


One Night Stand

by HermitLibrary_Archivist



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: BDSM, F/M, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-26
Updated: 2008-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:34:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 73,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4830980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermitLibrary_Archivist/pseuds/HermitLibrary_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Sebastian and Nova</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Night Stand

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Judith and Aralias, the archivists: This story was originally archived at [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Hermit_Library), which was closed due to maintenance costs and lack of time. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2015. We posted announcements about the move and emailed authors as we imported, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hermitlibrary/profile). 
> 
> This work has been backdated to 26th of May 2008, which is the last date the Hermit.org archive was updated, not the date this fic was written. In some cases, fics can be dated more precisely by searching for the zine they were originally published in on [Fanlore](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page).

They had a round table.   
Unfortunately, this prompted Avon to point out the similarities between Blake and Arthur. Also the differences. 

Well, if no longer unfamiliar after six months, Avon certainly hadn't improved on acquaintance. Blake had stopped thinking that he was shy, perhaps, or uncharacteristically awkward because he was unhappy, someone who would warm up and open out into the best of companions, given time. No, it had become clear by now that Avon was a darkly complex being, perverse by choice, if not by nature.

However, in this nightclub on the neutral planet Nirvana, in a metropolis where they could pass unnoticed among pleasure-seekers largely and determinedly unaffected by the state of the universe, Avon had proved useful, as he so often did. Indeed, indispensability was his only saving grace. 

Tonight, he had with him a pass-card which gained them all unconditional admittance to this exclusive place - "Faked," Avon said briefly, in response to Blake's interest - and it seemed a pleasant way of spending an evening, different enough from their usual occupations to divert everyone throroughly from gloom, worry and tension. Which was why they had come, of course. 

Blake leaned back in his armchair, stretched out his legs, took a first, appreciative sip of his drink and looked around with lively interest. The room was large and softly lit by bracketed lanterns, hung over dark, luxurious tapestries: a Babylonian-style battle depicted on the one nearest Blake, chariots and shields and longhaired Assyrians. The carpet, a soft blue webbed with dainty silver, was thick and plush underfoot. The seating was supple leather and extremely comfortable. Everything down to the delicate twisted-glass goblets on the table bespoke an unobtrusive opulence which pleased the eye and soothed at the same time. They had been given a good table, reasonably near the bar and right beside the dance floor, which was at present occupied by a girl singer, crooning in sensuous and husky tones. Blake let his eyes dwell on her for a while, then made an assessing sweep over his crew, sitting around the table with him, chairs facing outwards to the arena.

There was Cally. Attired in a long blue robe, she was eye-catchingly pretty, looking around with wide eyes at the richly varied spectrum of humanity on display tonight. She clung closely to their circle of six, leaning very slightly towards them, thin fingers toying with her glass. Next to her, Gan, large and solid in a floor-length black cloak, taking it all in his stride as very slow people do, goodnaturedly sharing a plate of some obtrusively crunchy snack with Vila. Vila himself, very much at home already, neatly and racily dressed in maroon, crimson and grey, eyes bright with expectation. 

Jenna, dazzlingly attractive and dressed to kill in a slinky gold outfit which hugged her beautiful figure tightly, her long blonde hair bobbing down her back, her face alight as she made small talk, revelling in this rare chance to be nothing more than a sociable partygoer. Jenna dreamed of elegance and found herself a pirate in real life. A disappointment, to be true, but one she wore with style. 

Avon. Aloof. Dressed in something well-cut with a pure silver vee relieving the overall blackness; his hair shining darkly; his eyes faintly hungry. He and Jenna were the two archetypal Alphas of a certain elitism in this party, both possessed of a classic, haughty beauty. Beside Avon, Blake felt pleasantly louche, at ease in a shirt whose sleeves he had rolled up to his elbows, a brown waistcoat swinging loose over all. It was, after all, a night off: a night to set the revolution aside, give a little free air to other preoccupations. 

Avon and Jenna. Both of them with that casual arrogance of attitude, the world-is-mine air. Wolves, the pair of them, trusting no-one, taking nothing and no one in good faith. 

Good faith! Blake sighed and lifted the glass to his lips. Naturally, various stimulant or tranquillising potions were freely on offer, depending on which area of your psyche needed attention. Blake, for example, was being slowly tranquillised. Avon, on the other hand, had probably taken a stimulant, because he was as sharp as glass and nasty with it. Vila was, no doubt, washing down one with the other.

They were sitting side by side, those two, and enjoying the entertainment. Blake, with half an ear on Jenna, laughed quietly to himself at some of Avon's driest comments concerning the floorshow, his quiet, acid voice intended for Vila, whose replies Blake couldn't hear. Their wit had an easy target. The floorshow was at present something of a talent contest, its participants drawn from the audience. A large woman was singing, her huge breasts wobbling frantically with every extended vibrato. 

"Avon's ideal woman." Vila leaned over and addressed Blake solemnly, under cover of a loud and shrill aria by Verdi.

Blake chuckled. "She looks a little large for Avon!"

"That's the whole point," Vila said. "She'd smother him."

Blake turned to look at Avon with some amazement. "Does he like being smothered?" 

His voice, to his annoyance, was already faintly slurred. He'd better watch it. The picture of himself, incapable, being helped out on Gan's arm before Avon's sardonic eye, was too unbearable to contemplate.

"Probably not, but at least it would keep him quiet for a while." 

Vila slapped him on the shoulder with camaraderie and leaned back. A vision of Avon, his head buried beneath fleshly pink billows, rose to Blake's mind. He smiled involuntarily. You could not imagine Avon indulging in anything so undignified as sex. And yet he must. 

Avon was watching him, neat and fresh as a diamond. Avon was always watching, that dark, brooding gaze trained exactingly on him, looking for flaws in his reasoning, a wavering in commitment. Then Avon could sear the gap with corrosive malice and walk away with devil's triumph in his eye. 

Blake sighed, feeling the intensity burn between them. Let up, Avon. I'm tired.

"I don't think our fearless leader is enjoying your repartee," Avon remarked. "No doubt his mind is on higher things." He turned his head and said, "Isn't it about time to return to the Liberator, Blake, and plan the next stage of your campaign?"

Blake closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. "Already planned."

"Where are we going, Blake?" Jenna asked keenly. Her perfume, a flowery musk, passed his way. 

He shushed her, without opening his eyes. "We're not talking business tonight."

"That is the whole point of this," Cally put in seriously. "A complete rest, which we all need very much."

The lady singer, arms flung wide, finished her last, piercing note. As it wobbled to a dying fall, Vila jumped up. He stamped his feet, unabashed, and cheered loudly. "Encore!" A storm of clapping, whistling and shouting broke out. "En - wop!"

Jenna had pulled Vila down, thrusting a hand over his mouth. She was now withdrawing it and wiping it with distaste. "Shut up, Vila. You can't really want her to sing again."

"Why not?" Vila asked, offended.

"Because it's cruel. Seeing too much of our technical adviser, by any chance, Vila?" 

Blake smiled secretly to himself. Jenna loathed Avon. Like a lusty weed in the rain, however, Avon seemed only to thrive on her dislike.

"Why cruel?" Avon was wanting to know. "Clearly, her life's desire is to perform before an audience. She can hardly afford to be choosy about their motives in listening. People are much more in control of their own fate than Blake would have us believe."

An argument ensued, which Blake mentally tuned out of, having decided that he rather agreed with Avon. Arguments among the crew were commonplace. Thrown together by circumstance, his little band were close only in the lion-pride sense that they presented a united front to outsiders. Within the group, they scrapped and snarled and slapped each other down with unsheathed claws.

The floor area was being cleared and men in overalls were setting up sound equipment. Dancing, it seemed, was next on the agenda. The table next to theirs was full of women, a work party out for a night on the town, perhaps. Shrieks of laughter kept bursting out like gunfire. Blake had already noticed some pretty girls among them - and noticed them noticing him with a flirtatious glance or two. 

One of them, a redhead with huge dark eyes, particularly took his fancy. He felt a mild stirring of lust at the possibility. It had been a long time. Too long... Idly he let pleasant intentions form. There were probably rooms upstairs or near at hand. 

Jenna was excusing herself, giving him a soft look and taking herself off. The Ladies' room, presumably. Music was starting up, loud but melodic. He swivelled in his seat to watch the band, three bone-thin individuals with green hair, playing a variety of synthesisers and bouncing vigorously up and down. It was infectiously cheerful. The floor was already filling up with dancers.

A gentle tap on his knee alerted him and he looked round, to see Avon settling in the seat next to him. He caught a faint waft of aftershave - something like pine. Oh, very nice, Avon. Who's it for? 

"You look bored. Not enough - excitement - for you here?" Avon frequently laid odd little stresses on uncontentious words to throw Blake, make him feel as if he were being accused of something. Blake was equable about it, most of the time. 

Avon's eyes gleamed in the low light. Blake answered him. "Is that all you had to say? I thought you were asking me to dance."

"I didn't know," Avon said, "that you were open to offers." Blake indicated the floor, with a questioning eyebrow raised. In a no-win situation, Avon backed down gracefully. "Very kind, but I'm afraid Jenna would scratch my eyes out. As she probably will, if she returns to find me in her place."

"Well, my money's on you, if it comes to a fight," Blake replied lightly. "But I must say, her perfume was more to my taste."

Quite untrue, as it happened, but for some reason it scored, Avon's face going blank for a second. Avon's uncanny skill at hitting the emotional mark was a weapon Blake too had at his command. Unlike Avon, however, he sometimes favoured a subtler approach to getting what he wanted from people. Avon either did not know that sweetness proved a better lure than poison or thought it beneath him to use it. Blake had never once seen him, not once, try the beguilement of charm. 

It was just as well, because Blake had the feeling that Avon could be much, much more dangerous, if ever he did. And Blake, who had a secret yen for dark eyes and romantic looks, thought he himself might just be the first to fall. 

His gaze, restlessly wandering, met the redhead's again. Avon didn't fail to spot it. "Another conquest, Blake! I think tonight's going to be your lucky night." Jenna was wending her way back, threading her way between tables. "One way or another."

"Can I rely on you to console the unlucky loser?" Blake asked, smiling, amused by Avon's unusual banter.

"I'm afraid not," Avon demurred. "One night stands carry such a high risk of infection."

Blake laughed. "Thanks, Avon. I'll keep that in mind."

"Excuse me," Jenna was saying to Avon, with a very hard stare.

"Dance?" Blake said, to forestall trouble. Jenna took his outstretched hand with a smile of pleasure. Blake didn't look back. 

He held her slender form close, as they moved to some sugary lyric. A pretty girl, was Jenna, and courageous too. The light strength of her moved him. "You dance well," she said into his ear.

Actually, he was barely moving. He shut his eyes, held her head lightly against his chest and breathed in the scent of her hair. His body was reacting strongly to the nearness of her. He wondered if she'd notice, decided she'd probably be flattered. They stayed on for another number and then went back to their table. 

Jenna gave him a half-shy, secret smile as they sat down again. Blake released her hand, inwardly wincing. He hoped Jenna hadn't got the wrong idea. The last thing he wanted was a romantic entanglement with any of his crew. That was a surefire invitation for disaster to step in. Tensions ran high enough, as it was. The delicate balancing of Jenna's proprietariness with the others' suspicions of favouritism was, he felt sure, quite beyond him. In fact, for fairness' sake, he now ought to dance with Cally - or Avon should. 

He glanced over at Avon. Vila was holding forth to Gan and Cally, while Avon sat a little apart, looking into space. He didn't look bored, merely contemplative, his hand idly encircling the stem of his glass, his distant dark eyes following the dancers. As Blake made desultory small-talk with Jenna and, occasionally, the others, he listened to Avon's silence. 

Avon was prone to withdrawing into himself, for no apparent reason. Blake didn't know whether or not to be pleased that the pricking cynicism had come to rest. Avon had been in an oddly provocative mood for a man with little apparent sense of humour. However, in point of fact, when the occasion was not a pitched space battle for their lives from the flight deck , Blake was glad of Avon's sharp tongue to flaunt his own against. Loyal to a fault, genuinely fond of his crew, he sometimes felt secretly tired of adoration. How sad it was, Blake mused, looking at the shuttered dark eyes, the sculpted mouth untwisted now by cynicism, that while friendship was a nice thing, good to have around you in a harsh world, only enmity, anger and lust roused your passions and your ambition.

A comedian was taking centre stage, beginning an act which Vila chuckled at unceasingly but everyone else from the Liberator found incomprehensible. Then a raffle was held. Vila won a bunch of flowers, which he gallantly presented to Cally, after plucking a single gorgeous bloom from it and offering it to Jenna. Cally was pleased with her gift, Jenna ungracious. Seeing Vila's pleasure waver and fade, for a moment Blake disliked Jenna. She turned to him and smiled soon after, her face transforming.

The evening went on. Blake drank a little more soma enhanced by adrenalin. Avon took alcohol but slowly, one glass to Vila's three. 

"Why?" Blake asked him, raising his own concoction for comparison. Avon looked at him incuriously. 

"I prefer the taste."

"Oh," Blake said, having expected something more complex. No-one, it was true, could like the taste of adrenalin and soma but it did tend to pick you up, even as it knocked you down. 

More entertainment was provided: acrobats, one of whom was possessed of a rubber body which he could twist with ease into inhuman positions, elegant or otherwise. It was a repulsive yet fascinating sight, the knit of bone and muscle stretched unnaturally beneath supple skin.

Vila was saying, "I had a girlfriend once, she was a trapeze artiste and you wouldn't believe, you just wouldn't believe, the things she could-"

Silent for an hour or more, Avon gave a sudden hard laugh, watching with a desultory eye the rubber one's doubled-over writhings. 

"I don't imagine he gets tired of being alone."

"Eugh, it's horrible," Jenna said, grimacing.

"Think of the years of training," Cally marvelled, absorbed, but failing to bring Vila's mind up to a higher plane. 

"She had the body of an angel - and the face of a troll but who looks at the sky, when you're watering the plants? Mind you-"

Still struggling, heart lurching, with the nearest thing to innuendo he had ever heard Avon express, Blake ducked under Vila's babbling voice and asked Avon, sotto voce, "What did you say?"

Avon only looked at him oddly and Blake realised that he must have had more adrenalin and soma than was good for him. His perceptions seemed heightened, his skin tingling with nerves. The great glass chandelier overhead sparkled as it turned in the light airstream, reflecting little sparkles across people's faces. Avon flickered in and out of the cast of light, his eyes quite black, his face pensive and melancholy, an occasional shine here and there picked out on the silver decoration of his black suit. Blake blinked, realising he was hypnotising himself, drooping nearer and nearer the table, so he pushed aside his glass with a firm hand. From a passing waiter, he ordered a pot of black coffee. It was strong and bracing. 

A troupe of dancers had appeared now, tall pretty things in peacock satin, pleasant to watch. Relaxed, his mind clearing a little under the probe of caffeine, Blake eased himself back into his very comfortable seat to watch. Jenna leaned against him, despite his lack of encouragement. Vila was visibly moved by the spectacle of long, bare legs kicking. Gan was tapping his foot to the music and smiling, quite oblivious to the fact that he was totally out of time. Cally watched impassively. 

As did Avon, his expression hard, almost disinterested. You really couldn't tell if he was enjoying the feminine beauty on view or not. For some reason, Blake found himself obsessed with seeing some sort of reaction from Avon. He felt peculiarly aware of Avon tonight. The most difficult of his crew, Avon was also the most fascinating. There were depths to Avon that Blake felt he had never touched, nor ever would with a lifetime's scratching him.

Blake danced with Cally, her narrow body firm to the touch and sweet, her glossy dark hair soft under his chin. When they returned, Vila swept her off. Blake pulled Jenna to her feet and held her close, folding her hand inside his own much larger one, against his chest. All he could see in his mind's eye were long, bare legs. 

Jenna closed her eyes dreamily and pressed herself against him. This unleashed fervent images to wipe out the innocent leggy vision - Jenna, on her knees, her pretty pink mouth stretched sweetly around his cock. A hot, honeyed fire rose in his loins. Speaking to him from another world, Jenna murmured, "You're so nice, Blake," and he felt a hearty rush of shame for his crude fantasies, which brought him a little to his senses. 

Staring open-eyed over her shoulder, he caught Avon's darkly sardonic gaze and the image which rose in his mind this time was Avon on his knees, partly undressed, hands bound behind his back. Now, this he didn't feel guilty for, matching Avon stare for stare, looking out towards him now and then, as he guided Jenna around the floor. 

Forcing himself down Avon's unwilling throat, half-choking him, making Avon swallow. Nasty and yet, just the thought of it made him throb with lust. He shook his head to clear the erotic daze. Things were going too far. Too much soma, definitely, netting down inhibition, and too long, no doubt, since he had indulged his body. He really should pick up a woman, get it over with. 

Flushed, Jenna retired once again to the Ladies' room, taking Cally with her - probably for a womanly talk, Jenna hopeful and excited. Vila was across at another table now, chattering to a small downy girl like a little, smooth-headed sparrow; Gan with him, smiling and listening to Vila whom he platonically admired, slow brown eyes occasionally wandering over to the friend of Vila's sparrow-girl, a larger individual and much more suitable for Gan.

Blake sat down next to Avon. "Don't you dance?" he said curtly.

"Not unless I have to," Avon said and Blake guessed that, when put to it, Avon would do it, as he did all things, rather better than average. 

Avon's eyes dwelt on him. Blake was used to that and no longer schooled his expression to something he presumed nobler under the scrutiny. 

"So, this is you off-duty." Avon sounded, not disappointed, but as if he had discovered something mildly interesting. "Just like other men. I imagined you stretched out with Karl Marx and a herbal infusion."

He found a direct look from somewhere, looking astonished. "Do you have me on some sort of pedestal, Avon? How touching."

Avon gave a little smile. He showed no signs of the drinking he'd been doing, other than an excessive shine to his eyes, black velvet touched by moonlight. He didn't seem inclined to reply. Jenna, Blake realised, would be back any moment. Expecting a denouement. 

"Are you sure I can't persuade you onto the floor?" he asked sarcastically. "I've got to do something to deflect Jenna."

"Ah!" Avon said, his voice soft. "It doesn't worry you that you might then be left with the problem of deflecting me?" 

Brown eyes met brown, gazes linking with delicate intricacy, raising doubts and desires so intense that Blake felt sick. He raised his head, nevertheless, and smiled. "That I could handle."

"Yes, you can handle anything, can't you, Blake?"

There was something there, for a moment, something alight and alive and unleashed. Then Avon smiled at him, the skin around his eyes creasing as his gaze narrowed, and Blake was jolted, because he knew then without a doubt that Avon was dangerous, as dangerous as Blake was himself, beyond the amiable exterior he showed to friends. His strangeness would feed upon Avon's, spark off things best left unwoken, if they only once let themselves touch. 

And yet it was tempting.

Jenna and Cally were returning. A black-and-white suited compere was taking the stage, his voice echoing startlingly around the room as he called them all to attention. He was promising them all something very special to come. They all settled around their table and prepared to watch. From the hushed air of expectancy, the way people were rushing to get a round of drinks before it began, you could be sure that this was the main attraction of the evening. 

It turned out to be an erotic tableau of Sapphic acts, set against an eggshell blue backdrop, very artistic and Grecian. Very young girls dressed in flimsy gauze performed various scenarios. Blake found it easy on the eye and intensely charming.

After a few minutes, Jenna snorted with disgust. "Horrible! Blake, let's go. It's embarrassing."

Annoyance touched him. He glanced at her hand on his knee.

"Actually, I'm enjoying it."

The hand was whisked away. "Enjoying it! Blake. It's disgusting."

He disdained to reply to that, because it was not. Unless you found the thinly-clad female form offensive - or, more likely, male appreciation of it in general, rather than particular. 

Well, he had blown it with Jenna - or solved the problem of Jenna, depending on your point of view. He decided that his view inclined to the latter. She was collecting Cally - "Jenna, I'm watching" - and marching out with her, tossing over her shoulder, "Cally and I will be back on board. When you've finished." 

Abashed, yet amused, Blake met Avon's eye. 

Vila was next to arrive at his side, muttering into his ear, "Gan and I are going." He nodded at the two ladies he had wooed, charmed and captivated with great success. "Our friends have invited us back to their rooms. Just for a nightcap, you understand."

"Tell them you don't wear one," Blake advised. "And, Vila..."

"What?"

Blake grabbed him by a departing arm. "Don't take off your bracelet."

"Of course not," Vila vowed, affronted, and was gone, the words drifting back to them. "Whatever else they drag off me, I promise I'll hang on to that."

"They don't seem to want to see the show either," Blake said.

Avon set his glass down with care. "Vila likes women who need men," he observed with an ironic tilt of his head. 

The females performing on the stage clearly did not need anything so hairily crude as men. In fact, it was just as well Jenna had left when she did. Most of the gauze was gone now, delicacy giving way rapidly to less circumspect displays. Blake found it movingly erotic; he supposed it reminded him of girls' dormitories, gentle innocence, soft stirrings of newborn arousal. How he and his young male friends, as teenagers, had longed to be invisible spectators inside girls' dressing rooms, imagining all sorts of hazy naked decadence taking place therein... All fantasy, no doubt. 

And what did Avon think? Was he too about to make his excuses and leave?

"Don't tell me," Blake said, sparing a quick glance for his quiet companion, "it disgusts you? You prefer women who need men?"

Avon took a mouthful of wine and set the glass down again, watching his own fingers stroke the scrolled stem. "Not always."

The finale was greeted with tumultuous applause. Blake leaned back in his chair and sighed. All around, there was a rustle like paper falling from the sky, as people stood up, some rushing to order more refreshments, some leaving. It was getting on for morning.

"Do you want another drink?" Avon asked him.

"No, I don't think so." A walk in the moonlight, perhaps, to clear his head; falling into bed then, with someone warm and willing. Blake sighed again. It had been so long since he had experienced anything approaching normal life, simple pleasures.

"Are you staying on? You may have dishumoured Jenna but your other admirer is still available." 

Gracefully Avon inclined his head towards the nearby table, steepling his fingers and considering Blake over them. Blake glanced over at the girl, collected a flirtatious glance tossed his way. 

While Blake poised restlessly on the dilemma, Avon rose and went off in the direction of the men's room. After a moment Blake followed him, pushing his way through the swing doors and crossing to stand beside Avon at the urinal, not looking at him, studying himself instead, in the mirror. His own eyes looked coldly out at him from beneath a head of curls, deceitfully playful. Jenna was misled, they all were, by his friendly face, his generosity of spirit, his impetuous protectiveness towards them. They believed, wrongly as it happened, that a sense of responsibility towards the human condition implied a sound, if not saintly, morality. All of them, even Cally and especially Jenna, were in love with a man who was not Blake. 

Only Avon was left, to see him as he really was. Blake combed the fingers of both hands through his hair and scowled ferociously into the mirror. The truth was, he was as touched by desire for sin as any man. 

More, he was not always sure that he was doing the right thing, yet he had to act as if he always did. He would kill, could kill and had killed in cold blood, if the need arose. Whatever Avon felt about him, good or bad, at least it was untouched by the scent of heroism. Only Avon's sardonic eye had whittled away the façade. The love of those who had not counted for nothing. 

So that was why he secretly craved friendship from Avon and bitterly knew he would not get it. Avon circled him warily, unmoved by charm, unimpressed by noble ambition. Blake felt there was nothing he could offer that Avon would ever want from him. 

Up to and including sex.

"Do you want to go back to the Liberator now?" Avon was asking him. His voice was quiet but it made Blake jump, out of his musings. For a moment in the mirror, their heads were side by side - Avon's smoother, darker than his unruly one; Avon's expression sharp, secretive, Blake's open and troubled. A devil making the best of it and a saint beset by doubts. 

Avon watched along with him and kept his thoughts to himself. Blake swung away from the mirror and made a quick, reckless decision. 

"No."

Avon only glanced at him curiously as he paced along at Blake's side. Blake turned, not left, back towards the noisy and frenetic ballroom but to the right along a corridor instead, through a Fire Exit and out onto the relative quiet and calm of the streets. 

They breathed in fresh cool air and stared up at the black night sky, stamped with sparkling patterns of an alien astronomy. No Hunter here with his studded belt, no Plough, nor Sirius, bright and steady. Blake saw a Big Wheel, a Grand Fire Mountain. Avon followed his gaze, inventing, perhaps, his own configurations.

"Let's go to a brothel," Blake said abruptly. Defiant, he met Avon's eyes with no shyness. "Well?" he said, head aggressively tilted. "What do you say?"

Avon breathed in: and out again, after a pause. Slightly stooped, he stood there, as if considering. 

Blake smiled at him ironically. "Don't be na{\239}ve, Avon. This is what shore leave's all about, isn't it? Didn't you come down here intending to get laid? Vila certainly did. Jenna did. I did."

Avon looked over at him and smiled bleakly back. "It never really occurred to me."

Blake stared. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked a little, impatiently. "Well, now I've put the idea into your saintly head, what about it? Don't just come along to please me," he added. "I don't need your protection. Or your company."

"What makes you think we'll come across a - brothel?" 

Blake thought this prevarication and turned on his heel. "Because, Avon, like germs they spring up anywhere they think they'll flourish. Every darkest corner you reach into, there's some poor lonely pervert waiting, in fact longing, to pay for his pleasure. Just like you and me."

"You paint such an appealingly sensuous picture," Avon said sarcastically. 

Blake had had enough now. He had no intention in the world to coax.

"All right, Avon. Then I'll leave you here." He nodded at Avon, without appeal, and made to go swiftly down the narrow dark street, towards the brighter lights, where dreams of any and every nature waited, day and night, to be bought. 

Avon caught his shoulder with a strength not immediately apparent from a glance at his build.

"Don't be so hasty. I didn't say I wasn't interested."

Blake accepted this just as calmly as the rejection. 

"Come on, then." 

Whatever happened, he was prepared to drift along with it. The soma had seen to that. Still conscious of a pleasantly nebulous excitement within, his senses were heightened by the cool, fresh air, the swathing darkness, the sharp light of the stars. They left the dark back street and turned into a broader thoroughfare. Here, there were plenty of people still, as if it were daytime - some groups of smartly-dressed partygoers, some tattered tramps lurching drunkenly into doorways.

"I don't know about you but it's been a long time since I did this. How do we find a brothel?" Avon murmured quietly.

"They'll find us. They can spot potential customers a mile off."

Sure enough, a few moments later a lady wearing a topless corset and two black garters appeared, at a window they were about to pass, and knocked on the glass to them, smiling. Blake smiled back, blew her a kiss from his fingertips and pulled Avon on.

"I never could stand all that fancy underwear."

They had certainly happened on the right district now; topless bars, bottomless bars, revues of various kinds all around. They stopped at a pavement café to drink a heartening coffee and watch the world pass by for a while - lights flashing, glasses clinking, people rushing here there and everywhere, shouts and fights and life. Avon indicated an 'all nude, all-girl show' on the opposite side of the road.

"More of the same? You seemed to enjoy it so much." He tilted his head, with malice. 

Blake said, "So did you." He wrapped a hand around his demi-tasse of coffee. "I thought the idea was participation, at this stage of the evening." 

He watched Avon, as the other man stirred a delicate silver spoon around in his cup. There was a pause. Avon removed the spoon, laid it precisely in his saucer. His downcast lashes were very long.

"Are you quite sure you want to go ahead with this, Blake?" he asked, with a kind of faint, humorous irony. "It strikes me that it's the sort of thing we shall spend much more time regretting than it takes to accomplish."

"Of course I'm sure." 

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask tartly if Avon didn't get tired of solitary vice practised alone in his cabin. One more glass of soma and he definitely would have. Mind you, Avon would probably answer, "No" without a second thought. People like Avon always considered their own attention a rare and precious gift, even when bestowed on themselves. Blake remembered a piece of graffiti, glimpsed when he was in the men's room with Avon, and laughed quietly to himself.

"Stick to masturbation; you get in touch with a better class of person," he said aloud.

Avon gave him a very cool look. However, his tone was direct and purposeful. Blake shivered under the bold black blaze of his eyes. "All right. Time's getting on, Blake. What exactly are you looking for? Straight sex?" There was a pause while Blake, winded, tried to work out what Avon might mean by the phrase. It depended on his relative innocence or otherwise. "Something," Avon added and his smile curved, brief and tainted, "more specialised?"

No. Avon was not innocent. 

Blake bent an eye towards Avon and wondered how he would take this. 

"Not that specialised. But would it bother you if I watched you? With your chosen lady?"

Avon's head came up from his coffee cup. He stared at Blake hard. Blake met his gaze, with uncomplicated enquiry. At last, Avon's coolness dissolved into a complicit smile, impure and taunting. 

"Would that - improve - matters for you?"

Blake didn't hedge. "Very probably."

"Then I wouldn't mind." 

Blake had hardly time to savour the victory of that, let alone feel the stirrings of anticipation. Avon's cup rasped startlingly on the latticed iron tabletop as he pushed it aside. 

"In that case-" Avon checked, as if stopping himself from speaking. Then he breathed out slowly and said in a dark, velvet voice, "If that's how things are, why not take it a little further?" Blake just looked at him. Avon continued, speaking softly, "The two of us with one woman."

Heart pounding, Blake ducked his head and examined the cup between his palms. He had been open about what he wanted and Avon had not scoffed or shown shock, had even stepped in with a little desire of his own: one which was remarkably revealing and Avon must have decided to risk that, before he spoke. No-one could be so na{\239}ve that they didn't understand the implications of troilism. 

He spoke without looking up. "And would that - improve - things for you?"

"Oh, I think so," Avon said with extreme quietness.

Blake's heart really was behaving oddly, thudding painfully. His chest was tight as he nerved himself for one final fling. 

He and Avon, distanced by more complex things than mere distrust, had come a little way tonight. He hoped his next words weren't going to send it all crashing down. 

He lifted his head and looked Avon straight in the eye, so there should be no mistake. He didn't want, afterwards, to be accused of ambiguity. Avon met his gaze, unafraid. Behind them, a party were taking a table with much scraping of chairs, shriekings of laughter both high-pitched and low. 

Blake cleared his throat and said, "That's fine by me. There is one more option. Say if the idea does nothing for you..." 

Avon looked still and watchful. The breeze stirred his hair, lifting it a little. Blake carried on quickly, before he lost his nerve. 

"We could go to a hotel, take a room. Just the two of us."

Avon waited, as if cautious, in case there should be more to come, but that was all Blake had to say. All he needed to say. Avon wouldn't misunderstand. 

Avon turned his head to one side and looked out to the street beyond, a laugh or a sigh escaping him. Oversensitised, Blake said quickly, "You preferred your own idea. That's all right, Avon. Just forget I-"

"Do you want me to forget?" Avon said, very dark and low, turning back to catch his eye searchingly. "Do you, Blake?"

Blake cleared his throat. "I don't think so."

All around them, people chatted and carried on with their lives, their evening out, quite unaware that, between the two quiet men in their midst, something far-reaching was taking shape. 

"Courage is something you don't lack, Blake," Avon said after a pause. "That was brave."

"I'm glad you appreciate that," Blake said with acid mockery. 

Avon was looking at him, cool and assessing. Blake was anything but cool. He ran a finger beneath the collar of his shirt to lift it away from overheated skin, then wiped the palms of his hands along his trousers.

"You would only be disappointed," Avon said with grace. "What's on sale here would do more for you than I could."

"The trouble is, Avon, I can't convince myself of that." 

He smiled at him, though his stomach was a tangle of fluttery nerves. Avon pushed his cup to one side, still half full. 

"I think you're mad; but perhaps I am too. Shall we go?"

They paid the bill and left. Blake was still shaking. He strode out, however, in his accustomed purposeful way. If Avon had been a girl to whom he had just pledged the night, he would have taken his hand in a firm and comfortable grasp. He did not quite dare. Which was a pity; no-one would have looked their way or thought them in any way odd. 

In the foyer of a large and unseedy hotel flashing "Vacancies", he waited while Avon, cool and passionless, enquired about a room, leaning on the counter as if he did this every night of his life. The proprietor, a small, bald man in his fifties, consulted an availability file on the computer. Avon turned to Blake and Blake caught his breath. It was all too possible to regret a choice made in a moment of madness and feel only boredom and muted dread at having to go through with it. Seeing all of Avon's unconscious beauty as he turned Blake's way, the - something - about Avon which drew Blake helplessly to him, he could only marvel, shakily, that Avon had agreed to this at all.

Dissolving, he leaned against the wall and watched as Avon took a step nearer. "Listen, Blake," Avon hissed, coming to stand very close to him and scanning him with narrowed eyes. "Get him away from there. At least five minutes."

Avon seemed to have faith in him, so Blake rallied to that, although he felt muzzy and unreal. He leaned over the counter and began a long patter about needing this, that and the other for a sudden flare-up of his Denebian space-plague. The proprietor, sympathetic to Blake's horrifying list of symptoms, pressed the button to close down and lock the computer shield and got up, to fetch what he asked for. 

When he was out of sight, Avon turned back to the console. Unflicking a probe, which he always carried about him somewhere, he made a delicate insertion and the shield lifted to reveal the screen. 

Blake watched impassively, arms folded, impressed as he always was by Avon's competence, his neat, speedy computations. Avon now had on the screen a list of names. He entered his own, plus a number. "Well now, this is the tricky part," he said, without turning.

"What are you doing?" Not that Blake cared. He felt he was going to explode with tension if they didn't get somewhere alone, very soon. How could Avon stay so calm?

Avon was answering him. "Just giving myself some available credit."

"He's coming," Blake said suddenly, coolly. He stayed where he was, arms still folded, examining the ground. Avon flicked off the screen and reactivated the shield. It scrolled down smoothly, just in time.

The proprietor handed Blake some things on a tray. Blake stared blankly at them for a moment and then remembered to thank him.

"Nasty thing, Denebian plague," the man said cheerfully. "You find the raw vegetables help, do you? Excuse my interest, I've got an aunt who suffers terribly."

"You don't eat it, of course," Blake said. "You apply it to the affected part. Keep it on till it rots. Works wonders."

The man marvelled. "I'll tell her, next time we're in touch. Now. Let's see. You wanted a room. Just the one night, is it?"

Avon agreed. Blake rested, content to let Avon handle this. He examined a poster on the wall, warning of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, a brutally frank list of unsanitary sexual practices to be discouraged. Blake turned away and read the Room Service menu instead. 

He turned back to the counter just as Avon was repocketing his credit card and a passkey with a number attached. The proprietor smiled at them both and rubbed his hands. 

"Just passing through, are you?"

"Yes," Avon said shortly.

The man produced a paper. Blake felt a pricking of unease. 

"I have to ask you this. It's the law. You are legally married, aren't you?" 

He smiled at them, bland and friendly. Blake experienced a dizzying feeling of being out of gear. Avon was quicker. 

"Not to each other," he snapped.

"Well, the problem is," the man explained, "this is a very moral state." His eyelid drooped slowly in an enormous wink.

"Yes, we've noticed," Avon said sarcastically. Above his head the neon sign from across the road constantly flashed in negative - "W O H S PII P" - on and off and on again.

"That being so," he continued, ingratiatingly cheerful, his whole manner indicating that he went through this routine many times a week, "Nirvana's regulations require a certificate of legal commitment from couples intending to share a room. Together, as it were."

Blake felt hot all over but Avon was icy. "I find that hard to believe," he stated flatly, "since you must get business companions passing through who require overnight accommodation."

"Fewer than you might believe, sir. But don't worry, all is not lost." He took out, from beneath the counter, a document of some kind or another. "I can serve as officiator, in my capacity as sidesman of the borough. The ceremony is nothing at all, really. A mere formality."

"I don't suppose the price is mere formality?" Avon enquired with silky acerbity. He had seen right through to the heart of this.

"For a man of your credit standing, I can't believe you'd let that influence you in any way at all."

Avon paused for a moment, head on one side, considering. He looked at Blake. "What do you say?" 

"I can't say I really understand the implications."

Avon was patient. "He's saying that, this being a fine upstanding moral community, it's against the law for you to share a room with me, unless we can produce a certificate of committed relationship. Which, of course," - he smiled briefly at Blake - "we don't happen to have. But fortunately enough, our friend here just happens to be able to document it for us. For a fee, of course. It's a racket, Blake. Just another money-making scam." 

"Does it have any legal significance?" Blake heard himself ask.

"Only in theory," Avon replied. "I imagine it can be dissolved readily enough. In any case, in the circumstances, its significance will obviously be nil."

Something so lightly made could surely be lightly broken. 

And they were beyond the law, anyway. What the hell could it possibly matter? 

The bizarre little ceremony took place in a small sideroom. Blake, speaking aloud from the card the man gave him to read, heard Avon's quiet responses in a daze. They recited some stock phrases - "to love, honour and support," Blake remembered afterwards - and both signed two copies of a document. The man took one. Blake, offered the other, pocketed it. 

As they stood in the lift, he took out the certificate and glanced at it. "Kerr Avon", it read, "on this day... to Roj Blake..." 

"Why didn't you give him a false name?" 

"I couldn't do that," Avon said, as tersely as if Blake were being deliberately obtuse. "I needed my real name to break into the computer credit files."

Blake was surprised. "I'd have thought you were blacklisted."

Avon looked faintly pleased with himself. "Officially, yes, of course. But I introduced a back door into the system a year or more ago, just in case. Coded so that I can access it when I need it, my direct line to the Central Credit agency. Then all trace of it disappears."

"That must have been difficult," Blake said.

Avon looked askance. "Not particularly. After all, I designed the entire base programme myself."

Blake grinned at Avon's smugness, slapped him lightly on the shoulder. "Beauty and brains." He must ask Avon, some time, about his computing career. What had Vila said? The number two man in all the Federated worlds? He looked again at the certificate he held and confirmed that he and Avon were married. It struck him as very funny and he began to chuckle. 

"Not a one-night stand, after all..."

Avon looked at him arrestingly and the lift stopped. "Look, Blake-" 

The doors slid apart and they got out. Blake looked at him enquiringly, waiting for direction. Avon looked at the key he held, turned it over absently in his hand. 

"Blake. I think we've both had too much to drink."

"Yes," Blake agreed, smiling, because he certainly felt completely and utterly detached from reality.

Avon spoke reasonably. "And I think what would be best for both of us is to forget all this and go back to the Liberator." 

Blake frowned. Avon stepped closer to him and looked into his eyes with concern. "Is that what you want, Blake?"

Blake made a short, harsh sound which might have been a laugh. 

"Oh, Avon... you don't know at all what I want. At all," he replied. 

Avon looked at him strangely but he said nothing more until they reached the door of their room. It was named, in curly lettering, The Blue Suite and from the absence of other doors along the landing, Blake guessed it occupied most of the top floor of the hotel. He grinned to himself. Nothing cheap about Avon. You could rely on him, if he was going to arrange a credit rating he had no intention of honouring, to ensure it was of the highest degree.

Once inside the large and sumptuous apartment, Blake paced around it slowly, while Avon disappeared into the bathroom. Well, this probably was the style Avon was accustomed to: plush white carpeting and tasteful furniture, light fittings which he fiddled with to produce a discreet glow. A huge picture window ran the length of the longest wall, with a view of the whole city from it, sparkling with lights beneath the blue-black night sky. He thought he could even make out the very pavement café where they had sat and bargained over sexual specifics, narrowing them down again and again. To this - two men alone in a room. 

He turned to see a huge bed along the far wall, about ten feet wide, with a long luxurious bedhead in padded black velvet. A panel of controls for video, etcetera. The centre of the room was a dipped area with long, curving steps leading down to a small pool in the shape of a teardrop. Filled with blue water, it looked extremely inviting. There were two loungers at the poolside and, ridiculously, a sun umbrella over a table. 

He spotted a bar at the other side of the room and went over to examine it. More soma didn't seem like a good idea, moments before he embarked on the most dangerous seduction of his life, so he was just pouring himself an innocuous fruit juice when Avon returned.

Blake sat down in an armchair with his glass and allowed his eyes to wander appreciatively over Avon. Avon had taken off his jacket to reveal a silk shirt, black, the top button undone. He was, Blake decided, unnaturally attractive. A lord of darkness, touched by magic - black magic. A creature of the night with a Transylvanian secret.

He did not want Avon to look quite so- 

Untamed. 

Then Avon fixed a narrowed dark gaze upon him and became, reassuringly, Avon again, cool and pensive, weighing profit against loss. 

"Are you sure you want to go through with this, Blake?"

Unlike his fantasy, he offered himself on one knee to Avon, arms around his waist, his cheek pressing against the other man's body. 

"I think we're making a mistake," Avon said, looking down at him with dark pessimism.

"Oh, so do I," Blake breathed. He turned his face to nuzzle the silk beneath his chin, entranced and enraptured. Of course it was a mistake. Anything as sweetly, cruelly sensuous as this had too high a price the morning after, but he was willing to pay it. He would pay anything. 

Avon looked down at the curly head, one hand coming up automatically to cradle it there. He felt all Blake's strength around him. This was something he had never expected from Blake. Blake battled with him and won, on just about every issue, riding roughshod over Avon and anyone else who opposed him. It did not seem a good idea to take things one step further, onto the quicksand of a sexual arena. 

And yet, they excited one another. It was always there between them, when they were working together, more so when they were engaged in some vituperative confrontation. He sparked off Blake, even as he kicked against him, and Blake's desire for revolution fed and fattened off the vibrancy between them: that was the way it was. He supposed it was inevitable that it had come to this - the two of them, alone in a locked room, with his desire and Blake's. His heart was pounding as he waited for Blake to make a move.

Blake trembled with a need so exquisite and so intense that he wanted to spin it out, stay forever at this plateau of delight, Avon here and his to amuse. He unfastened Avon's clothing with unsteady fingers, sighing when he touched him at last, the sweet silk of skin beneath the warm shirt. His hungry lips feasted here and there and finally came to rest at the centre of Avon's body, his eyes falling shut in rapture. 

But Avon gasped in shock, his fingers gripping Blake's shoulders. Seeing that he was going too fast, rushing him, Blake parted reluctantly from him, pressing one final kiss to the unexpected, secret tenderness of the other man's body.

"This is all so sudden, Blake," Avon managed, with a glint of sarcasm. "Don't you believe in foreplay?"

Blake grinned savagely. "I've done all that in my head."

"While you were dancing with Jenna," Avon agreed.

Blake got to his feet and began to strip off his clothes. "If I'd wanted Jenna, I wouldn't be here with you."

Avon watched Blake undressing, his eyelids flickering unsteadily as he followed the flying tangle of clothes landing on the floor, the naked, solid torso. Blake's build was powerful, his shoulders broad. An image of a miner or a blacksmith rose to Avon's mind: rippling muscles, the sheen of sweat over silken skin. He had a healthy, honest body, did Blake. 

Avon's eyes narrowed bleakly, with a desire so sudden and so fierce it took him by surprise. He continued to watch as Blake wandered down the steps to the pool, his eyes drawn to the clench of muscle in the buttocks as the other man moved unselfconsciously, the supple length of his long spine when he bent to dabble a hand in the water.

"It's warm. Coming in?"

He watched Blake submerge himself and shoot to the surface in an explosion of surf and an exuberant shout, brushing back soaked, tangled curls and laughing. Avon possessed himself of a poolside chair, undoing his own buttons in a leisurely way, shirt, cuffs, trousers, watching Blake float, eyes closed, the dark drift of body hair rising and falling in the gentle rocking water. Blake finally pulled himself out and looked around for a towel. Avon tossed him one and stripped himself of his remaining clothes. 

Then he turned on the poolside shower and stood under it, naked, braced to flinch. But actually, the fall of water was warm. He felt two arms slide around his waist and Blake nuzzle the back of his neck, hair-raising pleasure stealing intensely over his senses as Blake's cool, wet body pressed possessively against him and Blake's mouth made velvet passes over his sensitised skin. With a soft exclamation, he turned and their mouths met and clung. Avon's eyes fell shut as he opened himself into the kiss.

The water rained down on them, drenching hair, eyelashes, splashing off shoulders and arms, drowning them. Blake broke away but held onto Avon's wrist, looking over his shoulder into the wall-length mirror. His own face, square and good-looking in an offbeat way, peered back at him as he rested his chin on Avon's shoulder, biting him gently. Avon watched the play lazily, his eyes a low black gleam as he leaned back against the other man. Blake watched his own large hand slip around to fondle Avon's nipples, small and rising stiffly to his touch. Then he slipped both hands down Avon's sides to frame his cock, lifting from the dark damp hair at his groin. Avon's head lowered, to watch as well. Afterwards he dropped his head back on Blake's shoulder with a sigh, eyes half-closing as Blake stroked him, long and consideringly.

Reluctant to leave the mirror, Blake pulled Avon close back against him, felt his cock probe the cleft, the slight prickle of hair. Fevered images began to play across his mind. He thrust against Avon and pulled him close, fierce and urgent with desire, instinct taking over. He found himself desperate to kiss him again and had to let him go and turn him around and seek his mouth. He had often been tempted in anger to smash his hand against Avon's taunting mouth to silence him. Now he raped it, instead, with his tongue, a fierce and passionate duel of silence. Until he broke free, murmuring something indistinct, and swept Avon with him to the bed.

Avon was shivering, a fine tension lifting the hairs on his skin. Blake ran his hands possessively over Avon's body and let a deadly joy inflame him, along with the pounding in his senses and the tingling in his loins. He kissed away a water droplet glistening in black lashes and threw himself on top of Avon, collecting and pinning his wrists above his head. 

Avon tensed and opened his eyes.

"Avon?" Blake whispered. He dropped his head for a moment onto Avon's shoulder, then lifted it to stare searchingly into his eyes. Avon lay quite still, made no move. "Avon," Blake whispered again but this time only with regret, letting up the pressure, stroking a hand down Avon's stomach, teasing his cock with fingertips. Half resigned, half eager, he slithered down the bed and pressed his lips to Avon's groin, covering him with kisses. "Does this please you better?" and Avon's quiet voice, husky with desire, came down to him. 

"Oh, I think so."

Men like Avon always wanted to be sucked. It pandered to their notions of superiority or insecurity, Blake didn't know which. In any case, it was not an act which bothered him. He moved into a comfortable position between Avon's thighs and spared the time to smile hazily at him. He felt - so good. Happier than he had been in a long time. 

He mouthed Avon softly, sliding both hands beneath him to squeeze his buttocks as he tenderly took him into his mouth, vaguely disappointed that Avon, after the watery immersion, tasted so neutral. Never mind, by the morning-

There would be no morning. 

He laid his face along the length of Avon's cock, feeling it rigid against his cheek, lapping at the saltsweet tip. Oh, let me suck you off, Avon. He said it silently, over and over, like a prayer, a sudden yearning igniting and flying through him as he sucked and sucked sweetly; Avon trusting, so touchingly vulnerable to him that it seemed almost hurtful, almost too much to bear.

Avon murmured to him, "Use your tongue, Blake. There-"

And then a moment of silence, of utter stillness, the calm before the storm. 

So that, as Avon's hips lifted, he could only hold on, swallowing fast to be welcoming, to make it as good for Avon as he ever could, and he was glad to, glad of the hot quick spasms deep in his throat, of Avon's hands tangling tightly, unknowingly, in his hair. 

And when it was quite over, he lay quite still, almost trembling with the violence of need until at last, too long after, Avon took pity on him; but it was not enough to set him free.

 

 

Blake lay on his side, watching Avon's profile - the long, aristocratic nose, the sculpture of his lips, the long-lashed dark glory of his eyes. 

He felt touched with melancholy, a shivering of sadness. Raw and sensitive to Avon, he felt the unease acutely. He had wanted so much from Avon but he seemed already to have lost him. Avon had been willing to share sex, to cross that physical divide. Now he was as cold, as self-contained as ever, his psyche locked around him. Something warned Blake not to probe, to leave well alone, but he could not, he just was not made that way. Remembering how often Avon touched him, he tried the simplicity of it himself, holding Avon's body close, trying to find the right thing to say.

"You're not sorry we did this, are you?"

"Don't bother with clichés, Blake," Avon snapped peevishly. 

"It's my fault. I wanted - well." He fell silent. What had he wanted? 

"Blake, I'm sorry to absolve you of guilt. I know how much you enjoy it. But I made my own decision. I knew the risks and the consequences."

Blake shrugged. Although he knew this was exactly the effect Avon was trying for, he was already feeling the sparks of anger gathering. 

"And now you think it wasn't worth it."

"Of course it wasn't worth it."

Casually cruel, it wounded Blake to the core. He had known it, known at some deep level that playing with Avon was to invite disaster upon his head, a plague on both their houses... Avon was a twisted whippet of venom, sheathed in perfect darkness, and only a fool would shatter the glass. 

"No, I think I agree with you." Only the tightest control was keeping him from spitting into Avon's face. "But take heart, Avon. Hardly a memorable encounter, was it? In another hour we'll have forgotten it ever happened - and that's exactly the way you want it, right?" 

Avon stayed silent at that. Avon often used a contemptuous silence to put him at a tactical advantage. Just as it did now. Blake's sparks began to blaze. 

He made it brutal: it would be quicker. 

"You were right. I should have gone to a brothel. Any whore would have been more welcoming than you."

Avon said nothing. His skin seemed drained of colour, the delicate dark-and-light play of shadows across his face lending his looks a dramatic air, an actor from a classical age. 

So much anger, between them. Bed would be just one more battleground to play out their tensions and fury, over and over again. And he had known, that was the absurdity, that nothing to do with Avon would ever be simple, about as likely to lead to happiness as a conjunction with Servalan. 

And yet, it had been so- 

He put that behind him, because it had not lasted. About the only thing they could salvage from this now was hardly worth having. Nonetheless, they could not return to the Liberator without it.

He said with brittle, icy control, "Go back now, Avon. We don't need, either of us, to mention this ever again. Put it down to madness, the drink, if you like."

Avon had already left him, was picking up clothes. "Aren't you coming?"

"Actually, I think I'll stay. Night's young. Find some sweeter company, maybe."

"Ah!" Avon said. "The welcoming whore." 

He was dressing at speed as he spoke. Finished, he raised his bracelet to his mouth and addressed it in low tones. Blake looked away and didn't bother to listen. He felt confused and disoriented. What was happening to them? He watched it all falling apart around them and did not really know why.

"Goodbye then, Blake," Avon said. "You might need this" - a gentle patter of coins and flurrying notes came down onto the bed - "to tip the lady and I wish you greater pleasure of the experience than you had of me. But I did warn you."

The searching beam of the teleport found him then and he was taken up. Blake lay where he was, under the coinage of Avon's bitterness, his head turned to one side. 

He didn't summon a whore or sleep. He lay there for several hours, swam in the cleansing blue of the pool a few times and returned to the Liberator as daylight crept past the window. 

One night stands... carry such a high risk, Avon had said, and he spoke truer than he knew. 

Because Blake was infected now, all right, cursed and plagued with a sickness of the soul. Only something he would never have could free him.

 

 

Blake reviewed the events of the day. 

"Imagine you were standing on the edge of a cliff." 

"As long as you're not standing behind me."

He had made the reply, quick and smart. These days he lashed at Avon even before he needed to. 

Any satisfaction he might have felt had quite dissolved at the look on Avon's face - a cold, hostile patience, waiting for Blake to finish with childish interjections, so that he could proceed with the stuff of the real world. Blake winced and stroked the side of his cheek worriedly. He was unhappy with himself. He found it only too easy, time and time again, to jab at Avon and provoke him, while Avon in contrast seemed to have taken a step back, distanced himself. And unfortunately for both of them, it seemed that Avon's cool disinterest only brought out the heat in Blake. 

Blake's chin came up defiantly. 

And yet... 

Wasn't it Avon's fault? He had closed the door so very finally, without even wanting, it seemed, to know what Blake might offer him. All Avon wanted was a safe niche for his own skin and plenty of purloined wealth. He made that clear enough. 

Blake's expression hardened as he stared out of the window, into free space. Jenna entered, with Cally. He took a breath and informed them of the new developments.

"So, if we avoid the area for ever, it'll never happen - it's as simple as that?" Jenna exclaimed, her eyes shining as she came to stand in front of Blake. "Of course. Thank heavens you thought of that, Blake. I've been worrying myself sick."

He turned away from her. "It's Avon you've got to thank."

Disconcerted by his tone, she glanced at Cally. Blake had been moody lately, almost as difficult as Avon in a different sort of way, and there was a look in his eyes which had not been there before, a bitterness, a disenchantment. Jenna sighed and looked at the sensors. She frowned. Something-

 

And so the affair with The System began. 

Blake led them throughout with his usual flair, bargaining for them, not above pleading for them. They were all his responsibility and he never forgot that, not for one moment. By the skin of their teeth they survived.

But it was not the System he was thinking of that night, when he got to his room. Funny how quickly one forgot - how much more important the events which took place in their own little world here on the Liberator. Tonight, he saw Avon, again and again, calmly stepping across the room to sabotage a live and vicious powersnake with a death wish for Blake, knowing without question that to do so was to call it down upon himself instead. Blake looked, mocking himself, for any sign of love there but saw only the duty of honour Avon had laid upon himself. 

He really could not continue to let himself hope. It was cruel, sentimental, immature. He told himself this every time the sweet, savage ache gripped him. Far from having any - feelings - for him, Avon made it as clear as he could, day after day, that he opposed Blake in every vital way, disagreed with everything Blake was trying to do and, just for good measure, disliked Blake intensely on a personal front. 

And yet here he was, still foolishly hoping! 

It really was almost funny. 

Well, he had had one night. For curiosity, or whatever reason which Avon kept, like most things, to himself, Avon had agreed to him, given way to Blake's ardour. Just the once. 

Blake's lip curled in ironic contemplation. In fact, you could hardly count it. Both so wound up that it was over in a flash, with little time for tenderness and less for understanding. It wasn't that the sex had been bad. He still thrilled, painfully, to the memory of Avon, entrusting himself to Blake's ardent mouth.

Yes, I gave too much away, didn't I?

And Avon had been bemused by that or overwhelmed; had stepped back from him and away, out of his empty hands, leaving him still yearning. If he had only done things differently... for Avon, with darker shadings on his soul, could not have been expected to cope gracefully. 

All that desperate passion... he must have thought I'd eat him alive... 

Yes, and I could have done. 

Avon, delicate as eggshell, needed careful handling which he, warmed by drink and passion, had not been able to bestow. If only-

Well. If only. 

He tortured himself daily with just this sort of penance. Whips and thorns and ruby red blood came to mind. It didn't help that his cabin was next to Avon's. Nor that, in all his life, no-one had ever resisted him before. A personality to whom large gestures and emotions came easily, marking him out for notice or adoration or hatred, Blake could not reconcile himself to disinterest, especially and particularly not Avon's. 

He would do almost anything, right now, to get Avon's attention. 

He recognised this dangerous trait in himself with alarm, the only redemption being that Avon seemed well-armed to deflect him, indifference the best shield of all.

It had been a hell of a day. He felt weary down to his bones and yet he couldn't sleep. Angrily he threw back the covers and stalked out of his quarters to the medical unit. 

Dammit, Cally was there, looking at him with infuriating concern.

"You must get some rest, Blake."

"Exactly what I'm trying to do," he muttered with an irony he knew would be quite lost on her. He opened the cabinet and began to examine the drugs therein, looking for easy sleep. Before he knew it, she had him up on the diagnostic unit. "There's nothing wrong with me, Cally. I'm just an insomniac."

"There must be a reason for your insomnia."

Yes, Blake thought bitterly, and thank god it won't show up there.

The machine put some questions to him in a toneless female voice. He answered back tonelessly. After a few moments its findings were issued. Blake swung himself off the couch and stood up. "There. I told you. Nothing."

"Clinical depression is certainly not nothing," Cally said sternly. "We must take the right steps to counteract it."

He gave her a sweet smile, leaning past her to flick open the cabinet again. "And let's start with a nice cheering dose of soma."

"Counteracting the symptoms is no answer," she said primly.

"Sounds fine to me."

"We must attack the cause." 

O Christ, how could he escape? "Look, all I need is a good night's sleep. Right now I'm so tired I can't think straight."

"We-" 

Blake cut her off. "Hard work's the best answer I know to feeling sorry for yourself." And he was gone, with a whole ten units of soma clutched beneath his arm. 

Cally frowned anxiously. Why was Blake feeling sorry for himself? Depression was hardly rare among longterm space-dwellers, of course. Small wonder that Blake, with his driving, ambitious personality and tendency to brood, should fall victim to it. 

How long was it since he had been the optimistic fount of strength she had first come to rely on? 

Cally decided to take a second opinion. Avon was not asleep, not particularly welcoming either, but he gave her his attention. He breathed in hard, when he heard what she had to say, and looked beyond her. 

"Well, no doubt he'll survive."

She was shocked by his cold smile. "He is depressed, Avon."

"Isn't everyone?" Avon noted with sarcasm. In himself, it was an endemic state.

Cally was disappointed with Avon's cynicism, and cross. 

"Well, that is hardly helpful. I don't know why I bothered to tell you."

She turned to flounce out and Avon's voice quietly followed her.

"I don't know, either. Since you did, however... what, exactly, do you think I should do about it?"

"I imagined you would want to help," she said, not yet placated.

Avon sighed and put down the pen he was holding. "How?"

"You could show a little concern, at least."

Avon forbore to mention that anything whatsoever that he showed Blake these days was met by a backlash of hostility. He sighed again and stood up. 

"All right." 

Blake's door was not locked. Avon went through into the dark interior, negotiated obstacles like Blake's boots, sadly drooping where they had been kicked off, and arrived at the bedside. 

Blake's eyes were open, drowsy and dazed. A half-empty bottle of soma stood by the bedside. Blake wore only a pair of trousers. His chest was bare, sheened by sweat here and there. One hand came up wearily to rub his eyes. Despite himself, Avon smiled at the picture his leader made.

"Shaggy-breasted Achilles, his heart seething with black passion and his eyes like points of flame. Are you abusing drugs? Or are they abusing you?"

"While you were enjoying the luxury of a classical education, Avon, I was struggling against the evils of elitism. What do you want?"

"Cally thought I might be able to lift your depression." 

He met Blake's eyes, offering to share a mocking amusement, but Blake only looked away. Wrapped up in his own misery, he had no chance of noticing that Avon too was not quite himself, self-dosed on some midnight drug perhaps, his eyes softer than usual, his expression almost gentle as he looked down at the man on the bed. 

Blake turned his head restlessly. "Depression I can put up with. It's the insomnia I can't stand."

After a long moment Avon leaned over the bed, dropping to one knee beside it, and brushed a kiss across Blake's chest. 

Blake's eyelids flew upwards in shock. He stared mutely at Avon.

Avon touched him lightly, offering. 

"Would this help?"

Help? 

He heard himself, unchained by the soma, moan softly as Avon's hair feathered across him, lips caressed his nipple again, a breath of infinite promise. 

"No, it wouldn't bloody well help," he forced out.

"It's the best cure for insomnia I know," Avon said quietly and he added gently, almost seductively, "Let it happen, Blake. Perhaps you need this tonight."

"After last time? I'm not quite sure I believe this is real, Avon. Forgive my scepticism."

"Close your eyes, Blake," Avon soothed mechanically. "Just close your eyes. It can be anyone you want it to be."

Astonishment and disbelief stayed him. He did shut his eyes and felt Avon stroking him softly, with a gentleness his starved senses fed upon greedily, all of himself centred in his sudden, fierce response. 

Avon's dark, low voice came to his ears, spoke to him, intoning a sexual litany to please him. Blake had no need of it. The man's presence, his touch, was enough and more. He listened, anyway. Slow, sweet magic began to spin his senses. Too soon, too soon by far, he reached flashpoint, his cock spattering its silken message into Avon's throat as he gasped and collapsed. 

Overcome with a sweet lassitude, he lay there, sleep gathering around him like a cradle. Then, for no reason, his eyelids faltered open and he saw Avon, still there sitting beside him, his expression cool, curious. And what he was reminded of was a scientist examining a treated specimen for signs of change.

"God help me, Avon," he breathed. "Get out of here, go on. Get out." 

He saw a distant concern in Avon's eyes and he wanted to be sick. His gorge literally filled, with nausea, with shame, with fury at the enormity of the condescension, at whatever must have prompted Avon to come here. On a mission of sickening mercy.

"I really think you've misunderstood me, Avon," he said with deadly intent. "You came in at the wrong time. I admit I just couldn't resist your charming offer. And it wasn't bad, as these things go. But let's get one thing straight between us. If you were the last person left alive, I'd rather-"

Avon had gone but not before Blake got out the last word, crude and precise. 

He lay on his back, smiling fiercely up at the ceiling, too proud for anything else. 

Because he had lied. It really had been quite beautiful. 

Until Avon had tainted it forever by his detachment and his pity, a wetnurse manipulating the puling infant, crooning to put it to sleep, so everyone else could rest. 

He reached out for the flask of soma and drank the whole lot. 

Well, at least he slept. 

Avon did not. 

On his way to the flight deck he encountered Cally and walked a little faster, past her. No escape, however - she called after him enquiringly. 

He turned around and spread his hands. 

"I tried," he said, with such bitter mockery, a joke so black and so private that Cally went on her way without being any the wiser and yet still the terrible sting of it touched her, sent her uneasy to her bed, one more sleepless night among the many to come. 

 

 

They had Orac now. Orac had weighted the odds in favour of their survival. Some of the pressure was off them. Blake had steadied himself and withdrawn so absolutely from any personal contact that no-one could say for sure whether he had problems or whether he was simply focussing all his attention on his self-imposed responsibility to the universe. In any case he was efficient, organised and cold.

After a tipoff from Orac, Avon watched Blake negotiate tirelessly for two days with the Elders of Chrysos, a world under pressure to join the Federation, something which Blake hoped to nip firmly in the bud by pressing his own suit upon them, ahead of of Servalan's. It was a densely populated world, rich in natural resources, its lifestyle a curious mixture of the archaic and the modern. Deeply religious and bound by historic customs, they were possibly sympathetic to Blake in a moralistic sense. However, it was far from an easy task to persuade them that their best interests lay in defying the might of the Federation and throwing in their lot with a rebel leader who might look the part but who had little to back up the fire in his eyes, save a passionate idealism.

It was, fortunately, the sort of thing Blake was so good at. He sat down cross-legged around the central fire with them, accepted a fur for his shoulders, a hunk of roasted meat and several large mugs of rough local mead; and he talked. Persuasively and gently, sometimes forcefully. Would the Elders not believe him? 

Well, I'd believe you, Avon thought cynically; but then, that was his own disgraceful struggle, renewed daily at dawn like the liver of Prometheus. He would believe anything Blake said, fool that he was. Avon often considered it ironic that Jenna and Vila should be so quick to condemn him as heartless, when in fact he was dangerously prone to obssessive passion. It didn't seem to occur to either of them that offence and defence are reverse sides of the same cloth.

Avon stayed on the outskirts, beyond the heat of the fire, a simple observer. During a lull in negotiations, Blake got up and came over to him, wearily rubbing a hand over his eyes. His face was smutty from the soot of the fire. Avon eyed him dispassionately, without moving from his negligent pose by the cavern wall.

"Well?"

"You should be listening," Blake said, yawning. "You're supposed to be here as my adviser." He turned to face the wall and leaned his head on his forearm.

"My advice is at your disposal." Avon could afford to be cynically detached. He was not in love as Blake was in love, with every passionate breath in his body, with the ideals of rebellion. "For what it's worth," he added, "my advice right now is for you to get some rest."

"Marvellous," Blake said wearily. "I bring you along for your acute political insight and all you can give me is homeopathy."

"Well, if that's what you need," Avon said absently, studying the marks of exhaustion, the lines dragging around Blake's eyes. He made up his mind. "Blake. Get some rest. You've done all that could be expected of you."

"Do you think so?" Blake turned to look at him. Tiredness betrayed his need of some word like this.

"Of course," Avon said coolly. "Anyone would admire your diplomacy. They're as moved by you as they would be by anyone. These are a humanitarian people. Lacking your own principles" - he edged this in, perversely wanting to see the light of contempt fire up in Blake's eye - "and unmoved by your passion, I can only be a poor substitute. Nevertheless, I think you'd better let me try. You need sleep."

Blake eyed him narrowly, looking for the snag. Avon met his glance without deception. In the end Blake sighed and turned away, rubbing those restless fingers over his skin again.

"Thanks, Avon. I appreciate it." He turned back. "Oh, and Avon - don't tread on any religious toes, any cultural ones come to that. Don't be fooled by the trappings of technology - these are a people holding onto the past. And when I look around me at the present, I can quite understand that."

He did not stress the importance of success in these negotiations. He did not need to. Avon understood as well as he. The others did not look much beyond their own little world, secure within space with zero pursuit ships on the horizon. Only Avon shared Blake's recognition of the relevance of wider things. Blake was glad, despite everything, to have Avon here on his side.

Avon approached one of the fur-clad Elders, who turned to gaze upon him with mild, enquiring eyes. "Blake is tired," Avon said neutrally. "Can you offer him hospitality while he rests?"

As they led Blake away, Avon crossed to the fire and sat down neatly in Blake's vacated space. All the robed and hooded Elders looked up from their conferral to examine him, a dark and brilliant contrast to his blunt and rugged leader.

"Well, gentlemen. What may I tell you that my valued comrade has not?" 

His sardonic, salty eye slid over them. 

A very different approach. 

Blake slept deep and dreamlessly in a cell like a monk's - white stone walls, black iron bed. After seven hours, Avon came to find him there, unsmutted, but his eyes wore the same wandering fatigue Blake's had. He waited until Blake stirred, opened his eyes and saw him there, as if it were a dream. He spoke Avon's name and smiled.

Blake's smiles were dangerous things. Avon recoiled from the sleepy warmth of it. To distract himself he wondered, not for the first time, if Blake had ever loved anyone in his life. 

"Blake," he acknowledged thinly. 

Blake remembered, then, and the moment of remembrance was startlingly visible. Avon's eyes creased but he didn't look away. 

Blake sat up and put his head briefly into his hands. A scent arose from the nest where he slept naked. The skin of back and shoulders looked very smooth. "All right, Avon," he said, muffled. "Catch me up on things."

Avon was remembering, quite incongruously, another time and another place. Achilles... 

He too was tired. He caught Blake's gaze, lifted up to his, and said, "They've agreed to join you."

Blake moved sharply, swaying from the waist upwards. "That's terrific, Avon," he said sincerely and Avon could see that, if he were anyone else in the world, Blake would have reached out and hugged him. "How did you manage that?"

"I didn't. You did. I just maintained your position."

"But that really is-" Blake paused, as if unable to take it in. 

Such a pity to spoil all that genuine joy. "Unfortunately," Avon said, "there is a catch," and he smiled inappropriately.

"Which is?"

"They have a problem with inbreeding," Avon said carefully. "Like the Ancient Egyptians, they're keen to keep their royal line untainted by the blood of the common man. They occasionally buy in husbands from off-planet - of a certain, very carefully selected pedigree - for their princesses." 

Blake must have guessed by now, although he said nothing nor moved, just kept on looking at Avon with those eyes that could, you might fancy, see clear through to a man's soul and beyond. Avon shifted his gaze away to the wall and continued.

"You should be flattered, Blake. They admire you, for more than just your swagger and the light in your eye. They will accede to your notions and refuse alliance with the Federation. More, they will fund a resistance movement and supply it with fighters - they have plenty of young men going spare, it seems. In return, they want you to found them a heritage."

Blake rubbed a hand through troubled curls and stared at Avon. "What?"

"Dersik has a daughter," Avon explained, dogged with determination. "Persis is her name. She is seventeen years old and it is the behest of the Elders that you marry her, according to their custom, and produce an heir."

Blake positively bounced in the bed and glared. "But that's impossible, Avon. Not only is it - unethical. Look at it from the practical side. It might take months to produce an heir."

Avon lit up, briefly, with mockery, his eyes wandering with insolent familiarity over Blake's chest. "For a man in his prime? A quarter is more my guess, with a young and fertile female. In any case-" 

Abruptly he swayed, passing a hand over his eyes. Despite his preoccupation, Blake found time, from somewhere, to notice. 

"Sit down, for godsake, before you tip up." 

Avon sat stiffly on a hardbacked wooden chair beside the bed and continued, unclosing his eyes, "In any case, although a ceremonial wedding and the attendant night is required of you, the process thereafter may be carried out by artificial insemination until the desired end is achieved. It's the same mixture," Avon mused, "of the sophisticated and the arcane which pervades the whole culture." His eyes snapped back to Blake. "Once the ceremony is over, all they will need from you-"

"Yes, I get the picture, Avon," Blake snapped testily. 

He began to bite his thumbnail. You'd like to suck it, really, Avon thought in amusement. You still need your comfort habits, and isn't that true for all of us? 

Blake's eyes came up to lock with Avon's and all nursery images fled from Avon's mind. "Well, if that's what you agreed to, I'd like to hear what you turned down."

"The sticking point was, as it always is, guarantees. They may like you but you don't have the weight and the force of the Federation behind you, to back up your tender. They feel that, as son-in-law to one of the Elders and father to their heir, then firm links of clansmanship have been established, which they will trust you to honour."

Blake inhaled worriedly. They needed the support of these people as much as they had needed anything. He wasn't happy about it. But- 

"All right. I suppose I'll do it."

"I thought you would." Avon rose to his feet. 

Something made Blake ask, "Would you?" 

Avon looked down, arrested, attracted by the dilemma - an entirely academic one. "No, I don't think I would."

The anger which was always just at bay swamped Blake suddenly. 

"And yet you assumed that I would?" He threw back the covers and got out naked, glaring coldly at Avon.

"It means a lot to you," Avon said after a pause, the ground shifting under him. He surveyed Blake, up and down, icy-eyed.

"And nothing to you. I'm fighting for the world, while you're just along for the ride, isn't that right, Avon?" Blake pulled on his shirt, began to button it with deft fingers. "And you assume there's nothing I won't stoop to, in order to get what I want, is that right too?"

Blake's anger, as ever, fuelled Avon's perversity, so he said what he did not mean, accompanied by a blue-black stare that was direct, almost bold. 

"I didn't think it would be any great hardship to you. A night with a woman is something you were ready to pay for, not so very long ago." 

Alone in his cabin, with Blake's cold fury two thousand miles below him, Avon rued his unerring talent to hurt, bitterly, exactly and precisely. 

Blake would never know it but he did understand. 

 

They stood around a dank and chilly plain at dusk. Avon was reminded of nothing so much as Stonehenge and a Thomas Hardy sacrifice. Blake looked serious and ruggedly handsome in a knee-length black robe clasped with silver. The girl was small, veiled, young. On Blake's side were himself, Vila, Cally and Gan: Jenna had elected to remain behind and operate the teleport. Discreetly, no-one had commented.

The priest, an Elder in a long crimson dress, was talking quietly to the bride and groom - pre-nuptial words of wisdom, no doubt. Fifty or so Chrysoan natives were in attendance. This was a match of some importance and so the most senior members of the council were there, to witness this conjunction of Earth and Chrysos, symbolised by the joining of these two - one man, one woman, who did not even know one another. Avon shivered in the cold drizzle and watched Blake and his small virgin bride. Blake would be kind to her, with a strength she would admire and a gentleness which would save her pain. 

Not for her the raw adult sting of Blake's harshness. That he reserved for those who could match it and hide their wounds away.

All the witnesses were being summoned, to stand around the altarstone in a wide semicircle. Avon went with them. He wasn't, in point of fact, feeling very well, nerves and melancholy painting his mood with shadows. The wind whipped and whirled around him, spraying him with a spatter of drops. A mournful bird called and called overhead, somewhere in the heavy charcoal sky. He stood beside Vila, who winked at him, his skin a sickly greenish colour in the grim light. Gan stood on the other side of him, solemn and portentous. Avon leaned into him a little, grateful for the tiny respite from the battering rain. People jostled them on all sides; he could hardly see Blake at all. Water ran down his forehead and into his eyes, making him blink. When his blurry vision cleared, he discovered an Elder standing in front of him and smiling, saying something which was snatched from his lips by the wind.

Vila prodded him, yelling in his ear. "Wants you - go with him. Stand by Blake."

Bemused, Avon struggled along with the Elder, towards the group around the altar. Here, there was a circular upstanding of large stone obelisks, which offered a little shelter from the rain now driving down in slanting sheets, the wind that flew and keened around them, flapping at clothing, whipping hair into a frenzy.

"You must have a henchman, Blake," the Elder was saying kindly to Avon's leader. "To stand at your shoulder during the Ceremony, also to witness the Consummation. The law requires it."

A cloak was being put around Avon's shoulders. His first reaction was pity as he stared at Blake, the damp curls which scudded across his forehead, the brown bruises of his eyes in his white, white face. Avon's guts clenched. 

Then turned to water and his pity to ashes, as he heard Blake say, with cold clarity, "Not him. Fetch Gan, the large man."

The young girl was watching him, a glint of brown eyes through net. Apart from her, no-one was looking at him at all. It was clear that salvaging this was going to be difficult. Avon felt almost sorry for the gentle Elders, faced with doing the right thing in the light of their new son's unexpected lack of manners. Well, that was their problem. It was all Avon could do to breathe without being sick. He walked past Blake on unsteady legs, ready to make the long journey back in front of them all. He could see that Blake, stony-eyed, his face bleak under the drenching press of bitter weather, was about to speak to him. He didn't want to hear Blake's words as he passed but the wind lulled cruelly and it came to him like a shriek. 

"At least Gan won't enjoy it."

The comment seemed unnecessary but it worried at Avon, giving him merciful preoccupation as he walked past the curious stares. By the time he stood next to Vila again, he had remembered that far-off conversation, on the pleasure planet Nirvana many weeks ago. In front of the altar the ceremony resumed, Blake standing very upright as his cloak flared and danced merrily around his hips, Gan a solid pillar at his side. 

 

 

"I just didn't think Blake had that kind of viciousness in him."

"Look, Vila, why should Blake feel obliged to have Avon as his best man or whatever?" Jenna demanded. "It's up to him, surely. If he wanted Gan, then what's wrong with that? I don't understand why you're all making so much of it."

"No, but you would if you'd been there," Vila muttered, jettisoning a dark look in Jenna's direction. Cally had gone to bed, worn out by the waves of emotion battering her from all sides. "You didn't see the look on his face. Blake humiliated him in front of a hundred people and he had to turn and walk back."

Jenna was scathing and impatient, turning away from him, sick of the whole subject. If Avon was supposed to be so brokenhearted by such a petty incident, why could no-one see just how she was feeling? They might at least have the decency not to keep on and on about it.

"Well, Avon's got the biggest superiority complex I've ever seen." She'd heard Blake say so often enough. "It'll do him good."

"Did you ever know a severe dose of humiliation doing anyone any good?" Vila demanded. "Let's be honest - it'll make him worse than ever."

On her way out, Jenna tossed back, "All I can say is it serves Avon right. He gives Blake a hard enough time. If Blake decided to put him in his place for once, then he probably deserved it."

"He didn't," Vila yelled after her and then quietly, to himself, "No-one could have deserved that." 

 

It was all Blake could think too, numb as he smiled and said all the right things and made the right gestures of grace. The banquet was in his honour, in the vaulted Hall of the Elders. His bride was at his side. The whole thing had turned sour on him. He felt nothing, no optimism, no satisfaction, and yet not to go through with it was out of the question. He had chosen to pay their price for what he wanted, so he must. He didn't mind sacrificing himself. The trouble was that he had not foreseen his own careless sacrifice of Avon's precious blood. An unnecessary piece of nastiness that he knew he would rue forever. 

Vila and Cally, though invited, had elected to return to the Liberator. Gan was quiet at his other side. Even Gan had had time, by now, to realise just what Blake had done. 

And for what? For the reason that Avon had taunted him and he had lashed back. Like the king tickled by a wing of a bird, who had reached out and ripped away the offending feathers, so that the bird froze to death, the punishment seemed rather to outweigh the crime.

Amid the heapings of epicurean surfeit - roast kid stuffed with apples, pheasants, quails' eggs, baked salmon and fragrant spiced oranges - Blake toyed with a bread roll and resolved that henceforth there would be no more. No more bitter feelings about something that had never quite happened, no more expiations which would try to resolve themselves by hurting Avon and, ultimately, himself. They had played with fire, let sex touch them and change their lives: but it was over now. The past was done and must be left alone.

He jumped, as a hand on his arm restrained him from lifting his glass to his lips, and turned to look at Gan in lofty surprise. 

"I shouldn't have any more, Blake," Gan said in his deep, slow voice. "It's strong."

About to reply coolly, Blake thought better of it. 

"Thanks." He turned to smile at his new wife; she was very quiet. In fact, since the vows at the altar he had scarcely listened to, he had not heard her speak at all. "You must have some, as I can't," he said to her, smiling. At the least, it might relax her. He filled the rock crystal glass halfway with ruby red liquid and watched her drink beneath her veil. 

He had undergone, before the ceremony, an interview with the girl's father. 

"But you understand," he had said, wanting no mistake about this, "that I can't guarantee to return?" This was a matter he had thought would be more delicate than it turned out to be. In fact, it appeared that Avon had already queried many of these points on Blake's behalf. Avon was thorough; as a defence lawyer, unparallelled, the one mistake he had made still buried deep.

Dersik looked at him soberly. "One heir is all that is required of you. Once Persis is delivered of a live and healthy child, your obligation to her is ended - and your marriage dissolved, if you wish it."

"What will happen to her then?" Blake asked, frowning.

"She will be found another husband; one of our own people, perhaps." He smiled at some unseen thought. 

Perhaps there was already some cousin or distant relative, in mind for when duty had been suitably homaged. So much the better for her future.

"And our agreement? What will happen to that?"

"I believe the Council will look upon your cause, in preference to that of the Federation. If it is at all possible, we will continue to support you." The elderly man bent a look of unsmiling leniency upon him. "Whatever happens, you will remain the brother of our people, long after your child is grown. I can promise you that."

If I last that long. 

It gave him a strange, unearthly feeling to hear his child spoken of as if it already existed. He shivered, a goosestep on his grave.

"Persis is a favoured child of mine, a sweet daughter of my sour old age," Dersik said, "and I would only ask that you treat her with kindness."

"Of course," Blake said. 

He remembered that now, as he paused at the door of her chamber. An unnecessary promise - he had never forced any woman. Gan was here, in an antechamber off the main bedroom; the girl's maid too, a young woman who looked at him, he felt, with dislike. He smiled at her cheerfully, unhooking the clasps of his cloak and letting it fall over a chairback.

Gan was brick red. "I just want to say, Blake, that I won't be watching, or listening either." For there was no door to the anteroom but, as Blake looked around, he saw that the bed was not in sight from here, unless you stood at the archway, positively looking. This was better than he had expected. Obviously, the custom of witness had become tokenised since its inception.

Blake pressed his shoulder firmly, sorry for his embarrassment. "I know that." 

But Gan's expression did not lighten. He shrugged Blake off and turned away from him. Even the crew were on Avon's side - and quite right too, though Avon would welcome no champions. Right now, however, Avon would have to wait. Blake had other obligations to fulfil. 

Persis, daughter of Dersik, Lord of the Elders of all Chrysos, had come to her wedding night bathed, perfumed and unguented by her maids. They had giggled quite a lot, in true merriment and vicarious anticipation. They would, of course, expect her to regale them with the story tomorrow. Well, she might be coaxed. 

The man called Blake entered with a smile. He had a warmth to his character impossible to miss, even on short acquaintance, with that broad, friendly smile which creased up his eyes in laughter lines. Handsome but roughly so, like a barbarian: and so she was a little bit afraid. Even her friend Sallie, marrying a man she had loved since their childhood, had been pale, her chatter silenced, the morning after her wedding. And her man had been a noble princeling of the highest Chrysoan line, not some brutish stranger from the stars - however handsome, with his white silk cuffs and strong thighs. 

He sat down beside her on the bed where she waited, small in her white bedrobe, and took her hand in one of his. He shook out his head of curls and sighed, as if relaxing at last after a hard day. "There!" he said. "It's nice to be alone, after all those people." He looked around for drink, found a silver flagon and two glasses, poured some wine and put the glass in her hand. "Your fingers are cold."

There was a sparkle of sweat on her upper lip. Her teeth were very white, an endearing gap between them like a child's. She regarded him with unashamed curiosity over the rim of her goblet. "Won't you have some? It's good; my father gets it from Azeryan."

He smiled at her again with twinkling eyes. "I'm sure it's good. The trouble is, I had plenty at the banquet and too much makes you fall asleep."

She set the glass down. "Then I must not, either." She smiled at him, with a touch of mischief. "I don't want to sleep through my first wedding night."

That made him laugh, a long appreciative chuckle, and she laughed too. "I don't think there's much likelihood of that," he said solemnly. He took her hand in his again and stroked it gently with his thumb. Her fingers were still cold. "Are you scared?" he asked her gently. He had no idea how much she understood. For all he knew, she might be expecting the act of love to be a chaste kiss.

"Only a little," she answered composedly. "My women have prepared me."

For a bizarre moment he entertained the image of a chicken, anointed and trussed for sacrifice, but he realised what she had meant when she began to chatter on about the experiences of her maids, betraying by various anecdotes a degree of knowledge probably surpassing his own. He cut into her story about one poor woman, unable to walk for three days after wedding an old bachelor, with a cheerful "I'm sure your mobility is not in the least under threat," as he took the empty glass from her hand and set it to one side, then began to unclasp the high-necked fastenings of her robe. 

"Don't worry," he said to her softly, though she was only looking at him with sheer, bright-eyed curiosity. "You have nothing to fear from me, I promise you."

Actually, he was more worried about himself. Virgins were not much to his sexual taste these days. He preferred, by far, a lovely, long, naked tussle with a willing partner who knew exactly what they were doing. But as he uncovered her slight, bare body sheened with the silken skin of extreme youth, he felt a tender stirring, moved as men are meant to be moved by such a pure, unsullied innocence. Settling her carefully beside him on the bed, he kissed her mouth, which tasted of wine, and then, very gently, her small rose-pink nipples, barely budded. She laughed, a delightful musical sound, and pressed his head closer to her with eager fingers; and he knew then it was going to be all right, for both of them. 

 

 

She talked, when it was over. He held her close to his chest and tried to listen, yet his mind kept sliding away. 

At the point where he had known he was going to come, whatever happened, his tension had let up and allowed a different face from hers to slip unbidden into his mind. His orgasm had been poignant. Sweet but almost painful in the way that it rippled clear through to the cold yearning in his heart and then slipped away again, unsuccessful. 

But now he could not stop thinking about Avon. 

The other man had provoked him, it was true, but that was a game they always played. Sticks and stones... But if it was a game, this time Blake had played for real, as if his life depended on slashing Avon down. 

Avon, while he might argue with him in public, a threatened tiger snarling at him with a lifted paw and spitting, in practice was nothing but supportive. He might disagree, sarcastically, vehemently, with Blake's decisions but once overborne, he would work quietly towards Blake's ends, ready to catch him if he fell flat on his face - as he often did. 

Avon's arrows were not tipped with poison. 

After this, they might well be. 

You could hardly blame him. He had suffered a humiliation today, the like of which he would never have inflicted upon Blake.

"You are so quiet," she accused him. She had studied his face for a long minute and tired eventually of waiting for him to notice her. "Didn't I please you?" She laughed, knowing that she had, and walked slender fingers across his chest.

"Of course you did," he said, penitent. He caught the annoying hand and kissed it. "I'm sorry- " 

For one dreadful, spinning moment of chaos he had forgotten her name. 

"Persis," he discovered gratefully and offered a hearty kiss to her soft lips. There was an apt quotation for his after-sex depression which he groped for but couldn't find. Avon would have known. "Talk to me. Tell me what you want - a girl or a boy?" He touched her flat young stomach playfully, as if already the seedling grew within, which it might.

"A girl, of course. Doesn't everyone want a girl? With long hair to dress and-"

More to distract himself than anything else, he managed to extract, by dint of patient, pertinent questioning, that they had something of a population shortfall here on Chrysos. Men might father a thousand children or more but only so long as there were females to bear each one. Because they were essentially strangers, the talking soon ran out, leaving the question of what to do next. He guessed that she hadn't enjoyed it much, if at all, but he had been very gentle. He had had to be, because she was so tight, new and uncleaved. 

When he looked down at himself, he discovered startling streaks of blood. So he fetched water and washed himself, then his bride, discovering the pink flower between dainty folds. She liked that better than all that had gone before, which determined him to give her something she would enjoy. So he kissed her there, which made her laugh at first; and then she stopped laughing, hung in a suspenseful silence. Soon after, he felt her small tremors under his tongue and knew she would, after all, have something to tell her women. She slept; he barely dozed, plagued by anxiety and the depression which always hung heavily over him in the night, tangling his dreams with despair.

When he awoke, near dawn, she was kissing him with devout attention. 

"That's a nice way to be woken up," he told her drowsily and the kissing continued. It dawned on him gradually that a repeat performance was expected of him. Perhaps he was getting old - he must be twice her age - but he found it hard to rouse the interest. He concentrated his attention on her and she didn't notice. Shutting his eyes, he summoned fantasy to help him. His own hand would do the trick faster but it seemed so discourteous. Or Avon's mouth-

His eyelids creased in sudden ecstasy, as his body leapt with remembering Avon's beautiful mouth, sucking him dry. Power and life surged down to his groin, made him hard and ready; but even now that he no longer needed it, he could not let the fantasy alone.

...Avon's eyes, smouldering. Just watching Avon's anger, his black-eyed intensity, sometimes made Blake silently light up with a passion so sudden and so fervent that he feared it would show, humbled by his own peculiar response to the lightless, icy burn of Avon's fury. He longed to fall to his knees and feel the whip of Avon's contempt, harsh until he bled, sweetly, with desire but no remorse... 

He turned to Persis and held her slight body between his two hands, trembling with a control she interpreted, pleased, as passion.

He smiled at her. 

"You are so beautiful..." 

 

 

Jenna stepped forward as Blake materialised on the platform, running her eyes over him coldly. She was furious with him. How could he bow to a bizarre alien pact and calmly spend the night with some female he'd never met, when he had turned Jenna herself down without a second look? It made her feel cheap, as if he thought her offer casual, when it had been anything but. No doubt Blake thought she always threw in a side-dish of sex along with her flying skills! Fuelled by rage and the pithy comments she'd had a day and night to prepare, the words withered away when she saw him. 

Tired, pale even. Worried.

"All right?" she said quietly.

He nodded. "Where's Avon?"

"He's-" 

But Blake had gone.

He looked everywhere. Then he met Vila, yawning and rubbing his eyes. It was always either early morning or late at night by Vila's internal clock. 

"Where's Avon?"

Vila winked at him and slapped him on the shoulder. "How did it go?" For Gan, who had returned an hour ago, had been disappointingly reticent.

Blake regarded him coolly. "The usual way. Would you like details? Where is Avon?"

Vila remembered and his eyes slid away from Blake. "Dunno why you had to do that to him, Blake. Avon's got his pride, y'know. More than you and me, I shouldn't wonder."

Blake's eyes dwelt on the smaller man uncompromisingly. He spoke with great patience. "Just tell me," he said, "where he is."

Vila looked at him, suddenly alert. "Isn't he back yet?" 

 

"All I can tell you," Jenna said for the tenth time, "is what he told me. There was a Federation ship on the far side of the planet and he was going down nearby, to see if he could spot anything going on."

Blake was beyond anger. He had moved on to a dead-eyed calm which, paradoxically, frightened them more. They were shuffling metaphorical feet like jackdaw thieves with something to hide. 

"And you let him go, alone."

"Ah," Vila piped up, afraid for himself, afraid for Avon. "He did - er - make the suggestion I went with him but-"

"But you didn't," Blake finished for him. 

Hot-eyed with shame but angry too, Vila glared at him. "No, all right, I didn't go. But isn't it time you asked yourself why he went at all?"

No-one else had liked to say it. They all looked at Blake then, with curiosity, with disquiet, with disgust; and looked away. 

"Don't worry, Vila," Blake said with sweet venom. "I don't think I'm likely to forget." Or let myself off lightly, for what just might turn out to be the bitterest pay-off I ever made. 

He was, quite starkly, terrified. Avon had been gone, now, five hours. A ridiculous amount of time.

"Avon can look after himself, Blake," Jenna said at last, intending only comfort. She knew how Blake would insist on holding himself responsible for the well being of his crew, even when it was not strictly necessary. The simple comment drew that terrible cold gaze round to her.

"Are you so sure about that? Could any of us look after ourselves, alone on a strange planet with a Federation ship in the offing?"

"Well, at that, it was damn stupid of him to go," Vila muttered. "Just goes to show what a state-"

"Yes, well, don't let's start all that again," Jenna interrupted hastily.

"Why was it stupid?" Cally said, quick to Avon's defence. "He knew negotiations were delicate here, and important to Blake. Naturally, it would seem his duty to investigate the presence of a Federation vessel, when none had been reported to us."

Gan had thought about it, long and hard. "We don't know for sure that he's in trouble."

Blake said, speaking very slowly, very carefully, "He hasn't called in since just after he arrived. We can't reach him. It's been five hours. How many more damn hints do you need?"

Without another word, he set off for the teleport section, running, pausing only at his cabin to snatch a thick coat. Cally was with him by then. "I'm coming with you, Blake."

"And me," Vila put in, panting. "I'm coming too."

"How come this sudden rush of concern?" Blake asked, pushing past them. "What's suddenly changed, after five hours?"

"That's unfair, Blake," Cally said, her eyes sombre, stormy. "I did not even know he had gone."

"It was my rest period, Blake," Vila explained indignantly. "I thought he'd be back long ago."

"And you?" Blake asked Jenna. "No excuses from you?"

She met his eyes resolutely. "I'm sorry, Blake. I assumed, if he wanted to go, then it wasn't up to me to stop him. But I should have followed it up. We all make mistakes. All we can do now is try to put it right."

But they were unable to put it right. Despite an extensive search of the landscape below around the coordinates Avon had used, they found no trace of him. 

Nor of the Federation ship. 

 

 

Avon stood among trees, looking around warily. He had his gun in one hand; the other he brought up to his mouth, speaking quietly. "All right, Jenna, down and safe." 

She acknowledged him and he began to make his way through the undergrowth. He saw the ship within minutes of of walking - a small craft, for three people only or perhaps four. It appeared deserted. After a further ten minutes of a grassy trail through trees, he came across a clearing and a cluster of people, a conference around one of their damned stone tables. 

Servalan was there. 

Why? 

The same reason they were, of course, trying to fix a deal with Chrysoan dignitaries. However, the Liberator had slipped in by the back door. Even now, Blake would be sealing the union between Chrysos and his Cause.

I wish you greater joy of it than you had of me.

Avon blinked to clear the ghosts away. Why was it he could not forget? Such a little encounter. He did not know, had never known, what it was that he had done wrong. It must have been quite something. Blake had been spitting fire and brimstone at him ever since. 

Not knowing what it was Blake wanted of him, he had shared the sex Blake offered willingly enough, though the cynical side of himself had blazed out warnings that passion had not let him listen to. But it had been, of course, proved right. Even a lust which was mutual could not be slaked without running up some cost or another: you might be willing to pay it or you might not, always supposing you could identify it at all. 

Blake had once desired him. Enough, in fact, to make him forgo Jenna, the entire assembled talents of a pleasure planet and risk it all on Avon's potential contemptuous kick in the teeth. Which, Avon reflected, I should certainly have given him, if only to save myself the same. 

If you were the last person left alive...

Wary of Blake now, he had still not been prepared for the bitterness flung at him here on Chrysos. 

Not him. 

Alone in a forest, unseen, Avon smiled ironically to himself. What the hell did it matter? He was making too much of it, oversensitive to every little thing like a jealous girl. 

He checked his watch. Well, there would be one less virgin in the world by now. 

And one less woman, given another moment. He raised his gun, settled it in his hands, trained it on Servalan. 

She raised her head and looked directly at him.

"Avon." 

Heads around her lifted but he disregarded everyone else, keeping the weapon exactingly still. 

Servalan smiled at him sweetly. "You won't believe this, Avon, but I couldn't be more pleased to see you."

"What a pity your pleasure will be of such short duration."

"Now that," she said, watching his thumb poised over the button, "would be very unwise."

"Not from my point of view; naturally, I can see yours will be rather different." 

But even as his thumb pressed down, he felt a terrible, crushing pain behind; and then only blackness. 

Travis stood over the fallen form, breathing heavily, and looked down in triumph, throwing his bludgeon aside. 

 

 

"Run it again," Blake said. He was steady, fanatical and untouched by visible emotion; brown eyes trained on the little computer. "Again, Orac."

Orac's acidity dripped. "There is no point to this. There is, Blake, no virtue in multiplicity. All available outlets have already received this message. My time is too valuable to be wasted in such a futile fashion."

"Just so long as you're sure."

"Have you had any responses?" Jenna asked tentatively, behind him.

"Either no-one saw him or no-one's interested in passing that information onto us."

"Well, have faith in them, Blake. After all, you're one of them - by marriage, anyway."

Blake looked at Vila expressionlessly. The thief seemed to have bounced back chirpily enough from the loss of Avon. Jenna? Jenna felt concern because she knew she should. Cally was upset and worried. Blake himself- 

Drowning. Annihiliated. 

If Avon had been found dead, it might have been more comfortable to bear. 

But not to know... To search in the dark and watch the days slip past... The sense of snatching at time was exhausting and every waking moment passing was a moment lost. 

To find one man on an entire planet is difficult, if the man does not want to be found. But Avon, if jumping ship, would never have done so here. Avon was a child of technology: roasting oxen dripping fat in smoky fires was not his chosen style at all.

Vila, under Blake's steady eye, had reddened and looked away. 

"The most likely supposition," Orac said suddenly, "is, of course, that Avon is with the Federation."

"You mean, he's sold us out?" Jenna said incredulously.

"That is at present unclear."

You remembered at times like this that Orac was inhuman. 

"Avon would never do that," Blake's voice lashed out across them all. "Never."

"Well, you know him best, of course," Jenna said - simply or cynically, Blake didn't know.

"No, I can't believe Avon would sell us all to the Federation," Vila said and then screwed up his face, considering. "Not unless the price was right, anyway."

Blake walked out, away from them all. 

 

The man looked Avon over assessingly. He was a small, nondescript type, rather ferrety, pale beige in colour, completely unremarkable - until you noticed his eyes, which were lightless, perfectly dead. They were the sort of eyes which opened and looked at you in nightmares.

"Well," Ast Vincitti said to his charge. "You're going to learn to love me, my little one."

Avon knew with absolute certainty that it was true. You always did learn to love those who abused you and the more vicious the abuse, the sicker and blacker and more insidious the love that was spawned.

And so it began. 

 

 

It was a week later that Servalan first sent for Avon. She did not, of course, visit him in his cell. The odours sometimes clung around one's clothes and hair for hours afterwards. 

In one sense it made a welcome break for him. He had not left the cell for the whole seven days.

"Avon." She smiled that quick, humourless smile. "You're looking quite well, all things considered. Really quite well." 

His hair was longer and not clean. However, beneath the ragged fringe, two black eyes burned with a mocking dignity. 

"And they haven't broken your spirit," she approved, "which would be such a pity - Avon, without all that bitter pride! They tell me you aren't eating."

Avon stirred and tried out his voice gently. It rasped but worked. 

"I find it - more hygienic, that way."

"Oh, I quite agree," she said with genteel interest, head tilted to one side. "It must be." It was absurd. For all the world, they might be two old ladies at a tea party, discussing the nurture of roses. "But you must take something," she urged. "You want to be in reasonably good condition for Blake, don't you? It would be such a shame if he came all this way for a corpse."

Avon didn't reply to this. Perhaps it was too dear, too private a hope to be admitted to. She rose and walked around a little, elegantly sheathed in white silk, every movement a study in grace. He was, mercifully, well-covered in a blue overall which didn't suit him, all his brilliant darkness lost. Strange, how anyone at all could be reduced to the essence of mediocrity by such a simple expedient as removing the individuality of dress.

"And is Vincitti treating you well?"

Avon smiled then, a ghost of humour in his eye. "I believe - he's treating me to every nuance of his expertise."

"Good, good," she nodded. "Well, you deserve the best, Avon, and you certainly have it. Vincitti's work in this field is unsurpassed."

"I would like to know-" 

And for a moment, the strain showed.

She smiled encouragingly and pretended not to notice. "What would you like to know?"

He had hold of himself once again. "-exactly what it is you want from me." 

No trace there, in the cool, contained voice, of Avon's worst and most shameful memory, an echo too painful to bear, every nerve shredded, his very soul, it seemed, bruised; there was no one to help him but himself. And he heard himself, his own betraying voice, pleading- 

begging- 

"...just tell me what it is you want and I'll..." 

But only the various sounds of his own body's betrayal had answered him. The inhuman eyes looked on and told him nothing. 

"Yes, you must be curious," Servalan agreed, bright-eyed. "Well, Avon, it's really quite simple. You're going to give me Orac."

Too little food, too many thoughts must have fuddled his brain. He grasped at the sense of this but couldn't reach it. 

"Well, as your pet vulture could certainly confirm, I don't keep it concealed about me."

She stroked her fingers along his cheek, a knowing travesty. 

"Of course not. But I have you and Blake has Orac."

So that was it. Avon laughed and was abruptly surprised at himself. Laughter, even the bitter sort, had seemed impossibly far away. 

"I'm sorry to disappoint you. But Blake will be happy enough with that division of assets."

Again, that humourless smile which stretched wide her red lips around her sparkling teeth. 

"I think not, Avon. I really do believe," she mused, "that Blake will be prepared to sacrifice Orac to get you back."

"You're wrong," he stated flatly. 

Actually, he was not sure. Blake might just be foolish enough, in one of his impulsively idealistic gestures, to throw Orac in Servalan's face, for the sake of snatching Avon away. 

But Servalan judged others by herself. She, surely, would not be banking securely on Blake's fine, upstanding nature, his fatal guilt complex, his annoying assumption that responsibility for his fellow shipmates lay with him alone. Avon's brow creased with concentration.

"Congratulations, Avon." Servalan smiled at him, ogling him frankly from huge dark eyes. "I always assumed you were as straight as they come. You hide it so well. Quite a disappointment. Now Blake - that doesn't surprise me."

He had two options - sitting down or an embarrassing faint. Seeing the sudden translucency of his skin, she waved him impatiently into a chair.

"I see you've realised what I mean."

He managed a ghost of a smile. "Actually, no."

With one slender white hand, she tipped open a drawer and removed a sheet of paper. He recognised the blue corner flash which indicated its origin in Central Records, a peculiar timewarp sensation which recalled his previous life as a Federation citizen, working in neat offices: but even then he had had more secrets than most.

She was saying, "This is a complete list of all marriage contracts filed and recorded on a particular date. An employee of mine has the job of reading them all and reporting to me any interesting, or shall I say threatening, conjunctions. And this one, my dear Avon, is very interesting indeed."

She handed him the list. Highlighted were his own name and Blake's, against a date and a place he remembered all too well. He stared at it a moment, before the ridiculousness of it struck him and he began to laugh. 

"The ultimate absurdity... Oh no, Servalan. This time it's you who has misunderstood."

"It's there in black and white, Avon." She smiled still but she watched him narrowly.

"On the strength of this" - he struck the paper - "you are expecting Blake to hand over Orac in exchange for me. Well, that would really be almost amusing, if it weren't my guts at the mercy of your tallyman. For your information, Servalan, Blake hates me..."

She rose and swiftly circled his chair, her movements quick and light. "Already? The honeymoon is over so soon? Nevertheless, Avon, you can't deny that he would not have taken such a step, unless there had been some - feeling, shall we say?"

Avon glanced down at his hands, displeased to notice that his fingers were trembling. 

"You don't understand and never could. But I can assure you, the circumstances were not what you assume."

"Then what can they have been?" Servalan marvelled. "Really, Avon, this is fascinating. But then you have always struck me as a peculiarly fascinating man." She leaned her chin on her hand and gazed straight into his eyes.

"It was a matter of expedience, that's all. And one which Blake will not take kindly to a reminder of."

She smiled brightly at him and lifted a mirror to her face, examining it in a desultory fashion. "Well, we shall see, Avon. We shall see. I'm quite prepared to gamble. And you - well, you have no choice, I'm afraid."

Avon let the sheet of paper drop to the desk. 

"We are both outlaws. It would be an invalid contract, in any case." 

That point had, in fact, only just occurred to him. Not that it mattered in the slightest. The mirror, also, dropped to the desk, revealing Servalan's hard bright face and a very sweet smile indeed.

"Well, Avon," she purred, "that's just where you're wrong. Normally, of course you'd be right. But I've made a special dispensation for you and Blake, outlaws though you may be, and that contract is certainly as valid as it could possibly be. And backdated to the very moment of its creation." She tilted her head to one side, her hand making a graceful, outflowing gesture. "You really can't say the Supreme Commander has been ungenerous to you." 

His eyes searched her face, hard. She continued her bland smile, her eyes alight with some wicked knowledge. 

"No, Avon, your nuptials with Blake on Nirvana were as sanctioned as any ever made..." 

Alone in his cell, with one hour, seventeen minutes to go until Vincitti opened the door, he had nothing else to do but think. 

Try as he might, he could make no sense of it. 

 

 

After too long inactive, Blake exploded into action and let fly at the vidscreen.

"Stop-" 

and the nightmare stilled, capturing Avon forever, his head flung around towards the screen, his eyes expressing the unspeakable. 

Blake turned away from it, bolted for the bathroom. He didn't make it. 

Ten minutes later found him cleaned up and presentable on the flight deck.

"Zen. Set a course for the fifth sector, Classis Delta. Standard by twelve."

"What's that, Blake?" Jenna asked.

"Servalan is holding Avon there."

"What?" She came close to him, her eyes intent and probing. "You've had news, then?"

"A message came through an hour ago."

"But, Blake, let's think about this. Even if Avon is there, we can't take it by force."

"We don't have to. We're simply going to collect him."

"What?" Jenna stopped, realised she was getting nowhere. "You'd better tell me from the beginning."

"Not much to tell." Blake seemed so tense, his sentences chopped up, jerky. His eyes never rested on anything but flickered, darted on ceaselessly. "Servalan took him. Now she's offering him back."

"At a price, I suppose," Jenna guessed. Blake did not reply. She feared, then. He really did not look quite sane. "Blake? What is Servalan's price?"

"She wants Orac."

She was silent for a moment and then she began to talk, very calm, very reasonable. 

"But you can't give her Orac, Blake."

"Why not?"

"Because if you do, it's tantamount to handing her the Liberator..."

His eyes did meet hers then, for the first time, and she was the one to look away when he said, "Are you telling me that, in your opinion, Orac is worth more than Avon's life?"

"It sounds to me as if her price is all our lives," she said robustly. "Blake. Listen to me. You know as well as I do that, if Orac gets into Servalan's hands, then we've lost the one thing-"

"We managed well enough without it before."

"Yes, but Servalan didn't have it then." Jenna was getting desperate. She had the feeling she wasn't getting through to him at all.

"We'll get it back," he said, coldly casual.

Jenna felt the Liberator turn, the stars in the viewscreen streaming by like a silver explosion as the ship accelerated hugely. Time was running out. They were already on their way. 

She said nicely, placatingly, "Let's see what the others say."

"I'm not interested in what they say."

For all Blake's passionate defence of freedom, he, no more than the worst dictator, ever let anything stand between him and what he wanted to do. She had always seen that failing in him. So of course had Avon, who would, if he were here, point it out without a second thought. Her own courage quailed at the task. Her heart was sinking as she looked at his closed-off expression, his absolute determination that nothing in the world mattered except his own desire. 

It really would do no good at all to try persuading him to change tack. Even Avon had never achieved that. Blake would simply look astonished that everyone did not see the way as clear as he did, then patiently explain that he was right and so there was an end to it. But blacks and whites seemed to come very clearly contrasted to Blake, where the edges seemed muzzier and more confusing to everyone else.

Perhaps that was the difference between saints and mortals? 

Unfortunately, it was also the difference between mortals and evil fanatics. 

Jenna shook her head, helpless. Saint or fanatic, Blake was not evil. What he did, he did because he thought it best. And in any case she had no chance, not one, of making him change his mind. All she could do was try to understand.

She saw his face again and went to him, impulsively taking his hand. 

"Blake, what is it? What haven't you told me?"

But he wouldn't look at her. 

 

 

The torture had stopped. Stopped some days ago. That had to mean something. 

Or perhaps this, left alone, untended and speculating, was supposed to be worse. 

It wasn't. Avon eased his cramped limbs on the narrow pallet and examined himself for signs of recovery. 

And then he was taken to Servalan again, after a welcome shower and five minutes alone in a room with a razor, a pair of scissors and clean clothes. He supposed there was no point in taking up the possibility of suicide thus offered, though two days ago he would certainly have been grateful. How typical of life's little ironies.

"Well, Avon." Servalan assessed him, bright-eyed. "You're looking a little better than the last time I saw you. Fortunate, isn't it, that the body is so resilient? I do hope you forgive me for taking so many liberties with yours. Third-hand, of course. Perhaps next time I may sample them - more directly."

She insinuated herself around him, a seductive whisper of a caress he felt too abused to respond to. There had been one particular moment, when Vincitti had opened up a tiny part of him never meant to be used in such a fashion and passed into him a fine, hair-thin filament, looking incuriously into his eyes all the time. The pain it had caused was so exquisite, the degradation the sickest he had ever experienced, with his abuser noting down his every reaction, that then, at his lowest moment, Avon had wondered, without caring, if he would be capable of sexual response ever again.

"You disappoint me," Servalan said, drawing back from him. "I assumed you would be as passionate as the look in your eyes. Or has Blake, perhaps, spoiled you for women?" She ran a fingernail, red and sharp like a talon, down his chest and around his ribs.

"I'm afraid your untame ferret may have done that. While he concerned himself with me, I entertained myself with thoughts about you. My love for the female sex may just have been tainted forever."

The truth was that he was terribly low, in body and spirit, and what he wanted to know, he was too proud to ask. After a moment she settled herself in a chair, a cloud of light scent floating his way.

"Blake should be here any time," she said agreeably, "with Orac, of course - oh, I see you're pleased."

He had caught himself immediately. "You misread me," he said cuttingly. "I was simply surprised at Blake's stupidity. Though I suppose I shouldn't be. He's demonstrated it often enough in the past."

"Tell me about Orac, Avon. Is it worth less than your life, as Blake seems to think? I should be so disappointed, if that were so."

"Make up your own mind." 

Damn Blake for a fool. Was he really relinquishing Orac, without a fight? Servalan was betraying uncommon signs of excitement, stretching out her fingers, standing and pacing around a little, her dress a pearly fall of silk, quite bridal in its effect.

"Well, but you see, Avon, Blake would have to be a very hard man indeed to resist the appeal of those tapes I sent him." Sidelong, she noticed Avon's ashy comprehension with satisfaction. "Didn't I think to mention the tapes before? Oh, but Avon. Don't be upset. Or embarrassed..." 

Pronouncedly solicitious, she gave him a moment or two before continuing: "I only watched the smallest snippet myself. Blake, of course, may not have been so restrained." She peered at him, delighted at last by the reactions he could not hide. "Oh, Avon. You are upset, aren't you? Look at it this way. My sympathies are entirely with Blake. He really hasn't had a good week, has he?" Servalan smiled, with sweet concern. "And he'll have heard about Chrysos by now - oh, but I'll let him tell you that himself."

Chrysos. Avon tried to think about Chrysos but what brain power he had ever had seemed to be deserting him.

"Let's talk about something else." She settled herself near him and smiled at him intoxicatingly. "Tell me, Avon, what is it like for a man with another man? I've always wondered."

Avon rallied himself. He smiled. "Difficult," he said succinctly.

"Difficult? Then why bother? You have women aboard, don't you?" At the word 'women', Servalan, the essence of femininity at its most powerful, its most passionate, smiled a little, as if Cally and Jenna were hardly worthy of the name.

"Perhaps the challenge excites me."

"In what way?" Servalan pressed. Her eyes glittered with excitement.

Avon turned his head restlessly. "I'm afraid I'm just not in the mood to talk about it. Ask one of your guards. I'm sure any of them will be able to supply you with the titillating details you evidently crave."

She pursed her lips. "I thought you'd be only too pleased to pass the time in conversation. It might keep you from" - her quick eyes assessed him far too accurately - "worrying. Because you are worrying, aren't you, Avon? Are you afraid of Blake; is that it? Is he the dominant one?" She smiled at the word. "Yes, I can imagine that's the way it is. Despite the way you look and the way you dress, it's all a fraud."

"You can imagine it any way you choose."

Never deterred, Servalan took his hand and looked at it. He let it lie passively in hers. 

"It must be so unsanitary," she mused. "Such unnatural practices."

"It depends what you're used to, of course." 

Avon laid eyes on her with all the damning insolence of a king flicking off a rankish slut. It was, however, impossible to insult Servalan. She was dallying with him, quite pleasantly by her standards, and if he had failed to scratch back, she would have been disappointed.

She sighed and let his hand go, with a drifting caress. "So coy... you're letting me down, Avon." He didn't reply. "Such a pity you and I didn't meet under different circumstances," she said. "A man like you, I could use." Her eyes moved past him. On her desk, a light flashed.

Avon said flatly, "Very kind. But actually I've never had any desire to be used."

With one long, blood-tipped finger beneath his chin, she drew him forward and kissed him, her lips shockingly warm. After a moment he opened his mouth to her tongue, a delicate pointed thing like a snake. He was astounded to find desire rising like a flood, and laughter with it. It really was almost funny. Sick but funny, to find his traitorous body so quick to forget.

It was several moments before they parted. By then, Blake was already in the room, taking in the situation at a glance and saying, "I don't think you need have made yourself quite so much at home."

His arms were wrapped around Orac, which he set down carefully on a table. He barely glanced at his lost companion but Avon had plenty of time to observe him, as he turned for the confrontation with Servalan. Under the violent lighting, grey threads showed in Blake's hair. However, he looked strong and vital, a splash of colour and personality in the antiseptic surroundings, a breath of life, as he stood defying the might of the Federation, embodied by this frail serpent sheathed in white. Blake was twice her weight, a solid Robin Hood ruffian. If he had any vulnerability, it was not on show today. His voice held the clipped, cold tone he used when furiously angry, exerting his most precise control over his underlings.

"Here's Orac. Don't expect it to work. My last orders to it were a 24-hour shutdown."

"Blake," Servalan said sorrowfully, her eyes on her prize, "I'm afraid that isn't quite good enough. That will simply mean a 25-hour incarceration here for you."

"A 24-hour shutdown," Blake continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "or a total and permanent cessation of function, if the Liberator and all its crew, including Avon and myself, are not safely clear of this planetary system in two hours from now."

Servalan removed her eyes from Orac. She smiled. "My, my. You are a mistrustful soul, aren't you? Perhaps I should have imposed the same limitation on Avon."

"He looks as if you have," Blake said shortly. Avon had not been aware of any scrutiny but then, Blake never did miss much. "If he's not back to normal in 24 hours, I'll be returning for Orac. Agreed?"

"Oh, he will be," Servalan soothed. "And you can, at least, see that it is Avon. How do I know that this is Orac? It isn't at all what I expected." 

She walked around the table, laid a light, proprietary hand on the casing. Blake did not glance at the box. 

"Nevertheless, that's it. Take it or leave it."

"It had better be, Blake, it had better be," Servalan said with a severe smile. "Or I shall direct every hundredth part of the Federation's resources into hunting you down - and that's one promise I intend to keep. Take him away, Blake. He's going to be sick and I really can't abide illness around me."

"Try a different flavour of lipstick," Avon said to her, two seconds before his treacherous guts betrayed him and flung bile a full three feet forwards, to besmirch the cold pale walls. 

Blake snapped a bracelet shut on his wrist, even as he was still retching, and rasped a terse order into his own. Avon had to lean against him; he had no choice. At this precise moment he felt lower, sicker and blacker than at any other. He had, he supposed, desired to be rescued by Blake but now it had come, he saw it offered no real escape, only another doorway into another hell.

Making a red moue of distaste, Servalan's hand lifted, presumably to summon a minion to clear up the mess. It was the last thing he saw, before the familiar surroundings of the teleport chamber coalesced around him. Home. Of a sort. 

It was deserted, for which he was grateful. Blake swept him along the corridors in silence and stopped at the diagnostic unit.

"No," Avon said in cold revolt.

"You're damn well going in here, Avon, so don't waste your time."

Blake was in a furious, icy temper about something. This engaged Avon's curiosity. It was pity and kindness which he had feared, not the familiar shield of anger. 

"Was that Orac?" he thought to ask, to distract himself more than anything, as Blake laid him out on the table and gave him water to rinse his mouth.

"What did it look like? A pocket calculator?"

Avon snapped, "Then you're a fool." He spat into the vessel.

"What was I supposed to do? Watch you beg for another week?"

Avon stopped breathing, then resumed. 

"You were supposed to think of something else. Though thought doesn't seem to be your strong point. For a start, there's a full-size mock-up of Orac in my room, waiting for just such an eventuality as this."

Blake stared at him, his expression unreadable. "And just how was I supposed to guess that?"

"You should have looked," Avon said irritably and unreasonably.

Blake was heavy with irony. "Oh well, I will, next time someone wants one." 

He snapped on the scanner and examined the findings with his head bent over it. The silence stretched. 

"Nothing a mindwipe won't fix, I'm sure," Avon said with the utmost sarcasm.

"Very funny."

Avon remembered, then, and a sense of injustice rose in him bitterly. Bruised and fragile inside and out, mentally most of all, he had been hollowed and beaten into this egocentric cell of survival, which was all that remained of him. He could not be expected to tread delicately around other people's neuroses right now, nor even remember they had any. They were lucky enough to be alive and whole, with their self-respect firmly tucked around them, not newly torn to shreds and scattered to the solar winds. And any privacy, any dignity he might still lay claim to, Blake seemed determined to strip out now with this ruthless exposé. 

He did not apologise. Instead, he fell absolutely silent. The scanner began to give out its dispassionate resume of its subject's physical and mental wounds.

"Well," said Blake at last, "it looks as though you'll live."

"I was afraid of that." 

He began to sit up, felt a terrifying dizzying slide and had to wait until it passed. Blake offered him no help. 

"I'll go to my room now," Avon said, his voice faint, rallying to add, "Unless you want me to take a watch?"

The hiss and snap of Blake's recoil made him flinch. For one moment he had mistaken Blake's move as an act of physical aggression. 

"Don't play the bloody martyr, Avon. It doesn't suit you."

Avon thought about this and could not reply. He got to his feet and moved, ramrod straight, to the door. 

In that moment he knew that it was over, he must leave.

 

 

The Liberator swung out from its orbit into open space and sped from the area at the highest possible speed. Blake found Jenna calm and steady; he felt a warmth towards her. You could trust Jenna. She was dependable in a way that the others were not. She would adapt and settle to getting on with necessary things, no matter what the circumstances. Needing something, some diffuse comfort, he touched her as he spoke, but lightly. Taking comfort from her for himself was one thing; creating something else in her was another. 

She turned to smile at him as her gilded hair drifted through his fingers, a curiously happy moment. Jenna was so bright, so pretty.

"Is he being difficult?" she said softly. Jenna it was, of them all, who came closest to understanding his struggle with Avon, though not, perhaps, the fierce polarity of attraction.

"No more than you'd expect." It's me, he wanted to say, I'm being difficult, but he could only share so much with her and they had reached the limit. Casually, they moved apart.

"But how is he?" she asked crisply, fiddling with something. "He is all right, isn't he?"

Blake sighed. "Well, he's all there, if that's what you mean. Still grudging the world beneath his foot." 

He couldn't keep away, of course. The determination just wasn't there. 

In Avon's quarters, he found Avon dressed in something new, his hair trimmed extremely short, quite unbeautiful. He was sitting sideways at a desk, tinkering with Orac. 

At that, it couldn't be Orac. But, dogged by personal concerns, Blake could not even rouse a façade of curiosity. He turned away, hands in his pockets. 

"Are you all right?"

"Yes," Avon said. "Don't you expect me to be?"

"Was it very bad?"

The stupidest thing he had said so far. His fingers clenched, sweating. He wasn't disappointed. 

Avon's voice lashed like a whip in silver. "Run the tapes again. Obviously, you missed something first time round."

"She told you about the tapes?" Blake had received four. He had watched each one to the end and then destroyed it.

"All part," Avon said bleakly, "of the fun." 

His hand dropped, empty, to the desktop. His fragile calm breaking, Blake whirled around and placed his palms on the desk, forcing his face close to Avon's.

"Why the hell did you do it, Avon? Why, for godsake?"

Avon's dark eyes stared out at him, from a face made austere by the convict's hair. He had a kind of purity, a dignity which reminded Blake of a monk, or a saint. Hollowed inside by unnatural scours but over it all, steady with the will to endure. 

"Why did I do - what?" Avon said slowly.

"You know what I mean." He kept Avon's eyes in his, almost pleading. It was desperately important for him to know.

Avon's look was very cool, unpleasant. His head came up straight, his back snapping rigidly upright. "I seem to be misunderstanding this conversation. Are you suggesting that my little sojourn with Ast Vincitti was a front to satisfy some strange desire of my own?" The purity dissolved, reforming into an expression both mocking and perverse, lighting his eyes and making them dance blackly. "All right, Blake, let's not deny it. A little pain can be exquisite. Perhaps I'll show you some time. But not" -Avon's voice suddenly burned - "not, I assure you, when it's coupled to someone's sick enjoyment at exposing every last little piece of you, grinding it into the ground, forcing you to see how laughable it is. " His voice, which had risen to the harshest of rasps, now sank again to the softest of whispers. "How laughable you are..."

In the ensuing silence, Blake held onto anger. It was all that stood between him and annihilation. 

"Well, that's very dramatic. But it all does beg the question, doesn't it, of exactly what you thought you were doing? Doesn't it, Avon? You broke one of the first rules of survival. You went down there alone, without, apparently, making any contingency plans, in case something went wrong. Oh, don't tell me - you don't need to - that it was my fault you went at all. So Vila says. Would you agree with that, Avon?"

While he drew in a ragged, gasping breath, Avon was very still. 

"I'm so sorry," he said in that precise, well-made voice of his. "Naturally, you must be annoyed. You've spent a week of your valuable revolution-time searching for me and lost Orac at the end of it all. I wouldn't have bothered, myself. I was just falling in love with my captors. It's the inevitable side effect of abuse, I'm afraid." 

Avon paused and looked past Blake. His fingers endlessly turned and turned the little stylus he held.

Now Blake could scarcely contain his fury, his voice shaking annoyingly as he replied, "If I snatched you away from the jaws of pleasure, I can only apologise." 

But Avon's little spurt of contention had flickered and died out, mainly because he was desperately tired. "Listen, Blake. If that man walked in here now, I would kneel and touch his feet. You know that, you've seen me do it - and a hundred things worse. I've got to live with that and so must you and the quicker we both try to forget it, the better." 

Though he knew it was with him forever.

Blake watched that hand turning the stylus over and over and, unexpectedly, lost his anger and with it, the last defence. 

His vision blurred abruptly, so that everything sparkled before him, Avon's dark-jewelled eyes most of all, a treacherous beauty of vision. It was a pity Avon was watching him so closely, Blake thought. He could hardly fail to notice, and did not.

"Oh, Blake." Avon's voice sounded weary, exasperated. He stood up so quickly that his chair fell away behind with a clatter. Blake reached out, his arms lifting blindly, but Avon turned away from him and walked fast to the other side of the room. 

"Which of your many tortured emotions is this? Love - or hate? Guilt or anger? Pity? Contempt?"

"All of them," Blake said, his voice amazingly steady.

"Well, don't expect the same from me," Avon whipped at him. "He's left me nothing."

He had not expected brutality from Avon, not now that he himself had been honest. His hand lifted, then fell to his side as he exhaled. He thought that probably he should leave now. They were not helping one another. But then Avon sat down again and said with neutral enquiry, "Tell me about Chrysos."

It took him a long moment to realise what Avon meant and when he did, he didn't want to talk about it, the taste of it sour like bile in his throat.

"Oh yes, Chrysos. A wasted trip, all round. The Elders have reneged on their agreement with us. They're in the process of negotiating terms with the Federation."

"Why should they do that?" Avon asked curiously. His eyes had shut, allowing Blake to watch the play of light and shade on his face, but now they came open again and locked with Blake's eyes.

Blake forced a smile. Another quicksand. If only his voice would behave normally. 

"Very ironic. You'll like this. Someone did some detective work and discovered-" He reached inside his jacket and searched the inner pockets, until he found the little certificate he kept there, tightly folded. He tossed it to Avon. "This. Remember it?"

Avon glanced at it once and did not need to read it. "So that's what she meant."

"You know?"

"Servalan," Avon said, half to himself. "She knows about this contract. Naturally, she would bring it out, wherever it could do most harm." He looked directly across at his companion. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was important to you." After a heartbeat of resounding silence, he added, "The Chrysos alliance, I mean."

Blake turned away tiredly. Detached, so far away from it... in fact, it was hard to make it matter. But making it matter was important, because once such things lost their meaning, what was there to hold onto? It would be all too easy to decide that he did not care any more. 

"Well, I can't say the idea of being a father much appealed to me," he said, seizing on absolutely the least of it all, the one thing which had no significance.

"And a husband?" Avon asked, behind him.

Blake smiled unpleasantly. "Still the voyeur, Avon? Oh, I'd tell you," he added. "But it really was nothing out of the ordinary."

Avon's voice was a freezing whiplash of contempt. "How wilfully you misunderstand... I can only suppose it gives you some satisfaction."

Hopeless, Blake thought. It was hopeless, sinking already. 

He knew he had not imagined some rare gentleness in Avon tonight and if he could not respond to that, then whatever was there left to hope for? In every possible mood, he still felt this need to grind Avon beneath the heel of bitter eloquence. 

It was not something wrong with Avon. It was in himself. 

And yet, he did not want it this way. 

Not knowing what to do, he looked across at Avon. By some trick of the light, all he saw was the deep, deep dark of his eyes, the sweetly chiselled curve of lips which had touched his secrets when he needed it, the gentle swell between his legs. His eyes flickered angrily from point to exotic point. Avon saw and found it surreally amusing.

"Only you could be so inappropriate..."

"What?" Blake said, distracted and weary. He covered his eyes with his hand and rubbed them with tired abstraction. 

Avon watched Blake hide behind his anger. Flensed clean from subterfuge, pared to the essential truth of himself by Vincitti's ritual stripping, it irritated him. Blake had not, it seemed, come here to look after him, the scale of his own preoccupation being somewhat smaller - to wit, that he was sexually frustrated and didn't like to ask. Such simple problems, Avon reflected, were easily dealt with... His patience snapped and fine words fled. 

"Oh, do it then, Blake, if it means so much to you."

Quite deliberately, he slipped loose the buttons at his cuffs, watching Blake all the time with deliberate coquetry. Blake took a deep, slow breath, disbelieving at first. Then he realised he had known it would come to this, all along. Avon always offered sex, when talk broke down, but always for the wrong reasons. Blake gave a bitter laugh, remembering a far-off planet and Avon's coolly negative reply to his question of ethics.

"And you're the man who wouldn't screw for a nation," he said now.

"But I will for you. Make of it whatever you want." Avon had his shirt off by now. He turned one hand outwards in graceful invitation and waited, adding impatiently, when Blake did not instantly move, "Come here, Blake, and waste all that restless passion, before you drive me mad. If you think it matters to me after seven days with Ast Vincitti, you're quite wrong."

Unbelieving, Blake caught him by the shoulders and took Avon's face between his hands, his thumbs caressing the black wing of each eyebrow. His voice was softly drunken and tender, silk along a daggerpoint, as he said, "Sweetheart, you may have bedroom eyes but as a proposition - frankly, I've had better."

"So you tell me, every time," Avon said, unimpressed.

The anger was terrifying, the urge to crush him unstoppable: so Blake did, lunging forward and pressing Avon to him so hard, so fiercely he thought he might merge them together, teeth and flesh and soul. Bones cracked and blood rang. After countless time he became aware of Avon's rigid discomfort, of the burning ache of his own strained muscles. He let Avon go, a little but not too much, his senses entranced by his nearness, the smell of him, the bare warmth of his skin.

"You think you're so special, don't you, Avon?" he whispered to him, his hatred and his lust intoxicating him. "So damn special..."

"That's right," Avon said and the neat, perfect irony of this was utterly lost on Blake. Blake had not been taken apart body and soul and shown in the cruellest possible way that he was nothing special at all: that neither his brains nor his looks nor anything about him made him different from any other man locked in a cell and sadistically and sexually tortured, four times a day. At six, ten, two, and six again until, clockless, he knew the time at any given moment, precisely to the minute.

Blake was stripping off his clothes with trembling fingers. In the heat of lust, he was still trying to think, to make some sense of all this. "Sex is the easy answer, is that what you think?" He came into Avon's arms, shivering, skin against bare skin.

"I think it's no answer at all," was Avon's cryptic reply. "But it passes the time."

Blake closed his eyes with helpless delight when Avon's velvet body touched against his. He kissed Avon long and hard as they moved together towards the bed, his mouth eating Avon alive as he so often dreamed of doing. He pushed Avon down beneath him and overwhelmed him with kisses and touches and flying sweeps of his hands, murmuring to him inarticulately. Conscious, on some different plane, that as usual he was going too fast, leaving Avon way behind him, he tried to slow himself down. Fighting hard for breath, he struggled to sit up, lifting his hair away from his sweating forehead He looked down into Avon's eyes, opaque rings of darkness that he wanted desperately to inflame with his own passion.

They were so apart, so alone. And never more so than when they were having sex; Avon miles away from him, lost, perhaps, in some distant fantasy. Blake looked down at him and wondered what lover Avon held, while his body accepted Blake's touches; what esoteric sexual dream he wove for himself. He wanted to know, more than anything. He nerved himself to ask but something diverted him. 

His eyes, passing over Avon, noticed a dark red swelling beside his nipple; other marks, around his cock, unmistakeable. While he stared at them, Avon's eyes came open and followed his gaze. Strong hands grappled him downwards, as Avon snarled, "Get on with it, Blake."

His mind in a whirl, Blake did so, sucking until Avon pushed him away and reversed their positions. The ultimate shame, as Avon's sweet, hot mouth took him - because, far from being horrifed into useless limpness by the reminders of Avon's abuse, he found himself hugely excited at the thought of Avon's cool delicacy violated by unspeakable acts. It was sick and nasty and a terrible betrayal of his own honour, of Avon's, whose trust was implicit in this act. But he could neither help nor deny the pulsing hardness of his cock, the images which flashed hotly through his mind as Avon kissed his cock, on his knees to Blake. 

Relentless pleasure coursed through him. He slid his hands behind Avon's head and cradled it close to him, fingers rubbing through the warm silk of his hair, coming to rest on his scalp. Lost in sensual joy, tendrils of fine, sweet pleasure curling throughout his loins, he arched his hips and thrust hard down Avon's throat, the glory of it lifting him high and sweet and fierce, then drifting him back down to earth on gentle, exquisite pulses. Avon's tongue gentling him lazily, till the last, the very last throb of pleasure. His senses spinning still, he watched Avon swallow. Suddenly profoundly touched, he hugged Avon breathlessly, his lips brushing across Avon's cheek to his ear, telling him something, asking him something else, the intensity of his own voice burning pathways alive between them as he begged Avon hoarsely-

When sanity returned, he listened to the echoes of what he had just said, saw Avon listening too, enlightening himself with what Blake had meant him never to know. There was a silence between them and then: "Put it down to the heat of the moment," he said, facing Avon out brutally.

Betrayed out of his own mouth. Avon would never believe different now. Waiting for the storm which usually post-shadowed their lovemaking, he lay hushed, half tensed for it. But the dark cloud passed overhead, without touching him, and Avon stayed silent. 

So, after a while, daring, he slid the flat of his hand down Avon's chest, circling slowly across the black hair there: a tentative offer. Avon caught his wrist and held it there lightly.

"You're tired," Blake said, accepting the rejection quietly. "Do you want me to go?"

"No."

Blake stayed. It was peaceful. Beside him, Avon's chest rose lightly and fell, his breathing even and regular, his lashes a dark fringe on his cheekbones. Into Blake's mind came the image of Avon, on his knees to the man with odd eyes. Avon cynical at first, hard and sharp and verbally deflective, dwindling through heartbreaking degrees to the Avon of the last days, docile, gentle, moving where he was pushed, patient to whatever he was asked. 

But that Avon was also this Avon. 

Blake came fully awake. 

Sickness and horror sped through him like a virus as he realised the accomplice he had become - the accomplice Avon had made of him. Avon a twisted cypher of himself, submitting to Blake, because the habit was a drug he craved now. He had thought he needed Avon tonight: but Avon's need put his own simplistic desires into the shade. And he had been only too eager to play Avon's games on Avon's stage, because what Avon desired was also a leaning of his own. He remembered his own tremendous excitement with disgust, shutting his eyes in bleak loathing. And even as he despaired, his erection burned hotly anew, throbbing against Avon's naked thigh.

He had thought Avon asleep but Avon said, open-eyed in the dark, "What is it?"

"Nothing." 

He threw back the covers and stalked from the dark temptations of the room, its lights low and flickering, a vision straight from hell. 

Avon was there already. 

And to join him might be to imprison him there forever. 

 

 

He avoided Avon so perfectly that it looked natural. Avon knew, of course, and the dark, pensive gaze followed Blake everywhere and gave nothing away, asking no questions. 

The others bickered and squabbled just as usual, happy enough that the two Alpha males aboard were no longer engaged in a tense and uncomfortable powerplay. No doubt they perceived a calming of the waters, inferred that some agreement had been reached. In reality, it was simpler even than that. Blake, moving singlemindedly along his path of planned action, gave the orders. Avon did what he was asked to do. 

He did not even ask how Avon was, whether he was recovering. He left that to Cally, who cared at least as much for Avon as for anyone, and to Vila who was beginning to show a guarded interest, ready all the while with his quick thief's nous to snatch his fingers back, if the temperature should start to rise. Perhaps, Blake thought, Avon could find what he needed with one of them, even if it were nothing more than friendship. At least it would stay untainted by the darker needs which reared and conjoined all too readily with Blake's own. 

He no longer hoped for himself. No, that had long gone, fled like a silly insubstantial dream in daylight, a nostalgia slain by sickness. If they had not been able to get it right before Chrysos, they certainly would not now. 

 

Something else entered the field, another lever to brace them apart. 

Hard-bitten, hardily structured against the man who had the deepest cut of him, the last thing Blake wanted or expected was to fall for someone else. 

One night, prowling, he entered a rarely-used room and rummaged about for a while, whistling to himself, coughing, scratching his chest - all the little things that come so naturally when one believes oneself alone. This misapprehension was soon set right, when he heard a noise and discovered Jenna. Even crying, she was picturesque, with the primrose shine of her hair, her body trim and curvaceous like a doll's. He said all the usual things but she didn't enlighten him. In the end, blowing her nose prettily, she said, "I'm sorry, Blake. It really is nothing."

Jenna was so sensible, so practical. He relied on her so much. He was concerned. Was it possible that, wrapped in his own grim preoccupation, he had failed to notice the low morale of the rest of them? He could not stand the thought of that. It contravened the first law of leadership. 

"Jenna," he said firmly, "cheer up. Come with me and tell me what the matter is."

It turned out, as she had said, to be nothing or very nearly so: but a symptom, perhaps, of a deeper dissatisfaction and loneliness. He forked in a late supper and watched her toy with hers but he had her laughing within minutes and was kissing her not long after that. 

Unplanned and unforeseen, the sex between them was marvellously good. This was what it should be like, he caught himself thinking, while he poured himself into the warmth of her, their bodies perfectly linked as he lifted her with him and flew all the way to a glorious, sweating, tumultuous end. Then, guilty even in triumph, he dismissed that thought as somehow disloyal to Avon: and soon after that he ceased to think of Avon at all. 

Bemused and entranced by the sweetness he found in her, the reversal of their roles - here in bed she led, while he followed, eager, even desperate, to please - it hit him very hard at the time.

It was like waking from a dream when he realised he was not, after all, in love with her. Another person whose life he had tainted with false promise of permanence, not forgetting his own. What was wrong with him, that nothing, no good feeling ever lasted? 

Sick with himself, he tried to let her down gently and found with surprise that it was not necessary to say too much, that she had been expecting the end, almost since the beginning. Thus, it was possible to remain friends. He even visited her cabin sometimes still, at night. They still flew high together, high as ever, and they still laughed together and that, to Blake, was worth more than all the riches in the world.

For nothing else sparkled in their world at that time. 

Avon remained an enigma. To all outward purposes he had settled, resumed his character - deeper shadows in his eyes, perhaps, but he still spat the old fire. At the height of Blake's happy preoccupation with Jenna, one night he summoned Blake to his quarters. Blake went, not without some trepidation, not to mention preconception. Boltholes, secret plans to make money - he was on edge for Avon's leaving at any time. 

'Avon might run.' 

Would Avon run? Oh yes. 

But what Avon wanted to talk about was something quite different. He indicated the mock-up of Orac, still sitting on the table. 

"I thought you might be interested."

Blake walked around it warily. "Does it work?"

"Of course not," Avon said scathingly. "If I could create a computer to Orac's specification, do you think I'd be here, wearing myself away in a hopeless quest of misguided ideals? No, I'm afraid Ensor had the edge on me in the field of design. However," he smiled sharply, "he may not have had my other qualities."

"Which are?" Blake pulled up a chair and sat down.

"Self-interest," Avon said, "and persistence."

"Well?" Blake leaned back in his chair. "Are you going to tell me or am I supposed to guess?" 

Impossible, looking at Avon now, to imagine that here was a man whose naked body had lain against his own, to whose ears he had whispered in extremity a heartfelt plea of love. 

And Avon looked at him coldly. "If you can take it in. You're like a schoolboy, Blake. Infatuation doesn't suit you."

So Avon knew about Jenna. Blake wasn't really surprised. He had been circumspect but not secretive and Avon never missed a trick. He confined himself to a noncommittal smile. "Have you anything specific to say, Avon? Or is this just a pleasant social occasion?" He crossed one ankle over his knee and locked his hands behind his neck, stretching out in the chair.

"Don't let me keep you from any prior appointment," Avon said. No sarcasm, no acid - oh, much worse than that. Just a dark, chilling void.

Abruptly, looking at him, Blake experienced a shocking sense of nervousness. He sat up, abandoning provocation in the face of such a winter's landscape. "What do you want, Avon? Let's get on with it."

And Avon looked deliberately away, the moment mercifully broken. 

"I think I have the way to recover Orac now."

"Really?" Blake stared at him. "How?"

"I said nothing before," Avon continued, "because I wasn't sure how it could be done or if it could be done at all. But getting it back was always my responsibility and so-"

Blake's eyebrows rose, as he interrupted. "How do you arrive at that?"

Avon, with freezing politeness, had broken off to hear Blake out. Now he resumed, with a narrowed stare. "Orac was lost to you, because of me. Naturally-"

Blake did it again, rudely. "Ah, I see," he said and pursed his lips. "Still pathologically afraid to owe anyone anything, aren't you, Avon? People who can't give always feel that way."

"Don't be ridiculous," Avon snapped at him. 

When Avon was waspish, Blake found him at his least intimidating, which cheered him up and boosted his confidence at handling Avon no end. 

"Has love addled your brain even further? Even you, surely, can't be happy with exchanging Orac for the dubious pleasure of my owing you something?" 

He stared at Blake with narrowed eyes. Now Blake had the shaming sensation that Avon was behaving with maturity, while he teased like a child with a cat. He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table. "Orac," he prompted.

Avon eyed him with cool precision and returned to the matter in hand, with no apparent change of pace. "It occurred to me that I was looking at the problem the wrong way. Approaching Servalan and making off with Orac's physical form is not only impossible. The way things stand, it's also quite unnecessary. What is Orac, after all?"

He seemed to be waiting for a reply. Strict with himself now, Blake answered, "A computer."

Avon's eyes bored into him, abruptly rapt in his own field of expertise, in the sterile joy of solving a problem in logic neatly and beautifully. "Yes, and what is a computer?" He tapped the box in front of him, frowning. "Not a plastic box with lights that flash and a voice channel set up to project the personality of a contentious schoolmaster. No, stripped of its trappings, a computer, any computer, is merely a collection of originally simple instructions, run by an operating system which responds to data and input. Even Zen, even Orac - that's all they are."

Blake, ridiculously, wondered where Jenna was, what she was doing. If she was getting impatient, waiting for him... 

"I realise this is intensely tedious for you." Avon's thinly sardonic voice sharded through his inattention. "Let us condense it to the bare essentials. There is, as you know, already a link between Zen and Orac. I believe I can instruct a transfer, via Zen, of all the data that makes up the computer we know as Orac into Zen itself and hence, into this facsimile."

Blake stared at him. "Will that work?"

"I certainly hope so," Avon said.

Weariness flashed through the quiet lull of his voice and was gone. Blake realised that what Avon was telling him represented a phenomenal piece of conceptual thinking. Who knew how long Avon had struggled with it, forcing his mind to narrow down again and again, to concentrate, reaching out to grasp the vital leap in understanding, all the way from mere cleverness to the rocket of brilliance? 

He only said, "When do we try it?"

"In a few hours," Avon said indifferently. Story told, the life seemed to have gone out of him. "I won't bore you with the technical details. Suffice it to say that I still have several instructions to complete."

"What about the original Orac? Will that stay with Servalan?"

"Possibly," Avon agreed. "Ours will be, if you like, a copy. But an exact one. Eventually - quite shortly - I hope to be able to shut down the machine retained by Servalan, via ours."

Blake smiled. "I'm sure Orac will look upon it as a merciful rescue."

"Orac has no allegiance, Blake," Avon snapped, making Blake jump and look at him. "Many people - many fools - make the mistake of imparting human characteristics to a computer. But the truth - the truth, Blake, is that Orac is a machine which will respond to the commands of someone, anyone, who knows how to operate it. Sentiment does not enter into the picture at all."

Blake grinned involuntarily. Whatever Avon said - and he knew it to be true - it was hard to rid oneself of the picture of Orac, irascible and irritated with Servalan's greedy demands on his precious time, thinking that it wouldn't be so bad, after all, to be back with Liberator's crew, whose combined IQ Orac had always presumed, haughtily, to be a hundredth part of his own... 

He got up, walked around the table and pressed Avon's shoulder firmly, man to man. "Thank you." He took his hand away. 

Avon sat very still. "There is one more thing, before you run away to whatever it is you are so keen to reach."

"Yes?" Blake said levelly. He sat down again.

"The contract between us," Avon said with an absolute lack of emotion. "During my dealings with the mainline Federation computer, I came across an access link to Central Records. I took the opportunity to erase your name and mine in the registers."

Blake took this in; rocked in his seat; steepled his hands. 

"I see. Does that mean that it's dissolved? That it no longer exists?"

Avon hesitated and looked past him. Every reference to this was a delicate matter for them, stemming from where it had - a path of pretty nasty thorns and only bare and tender feet to tread the way. 

"Well now, in fact, it exists until we declare it to be void, at some registration point which we would have to attend in person and together. But what I have done should mean that, for all practical purposes, it shouldn't arise to further - inconvenience us."

Blake felt- 

He didn't know how he felt. 

He gave a short laugh. "Very ironic. You mean, it was a façade in the first place and now its nonexistence is also a façade. A sort of double twist."

"I mean, Blake, that future embarrassments like the secession of Chrysos should not happen," Avon said coldly. "Of course, if you wish it properly dissolved for your own purposes, then we shall have to think again. But at the time I believed this would be all that was necessary."

For your own purposes. It was not something he had really considered - but perhaps Jenna might be expecting it. His eyebrows rose. Now that could be, as Avon said, embarrassing. Was that what the other man, patient and emotionless, had been trying to tell him? 

He shook his head, getting to his feet. "What a lot of trouble... for one ridiculous piece of paper."

"Ridiculous," Avon agreed. "As you say."

Something about the way he said it- 

It hadn't been Avon's fault. Not his idea to go seeking wicked pleasure among strangers, then demand it, instead, from a friend. 

Who knew what Avon must be feeling? These days, Blake felt as far away from him as he had ever been - himself warmly loved and admired and wanted, Jenna waiting for him this very moment, to admit him to their own haven which he associated, more than anything, with laughter and a sort of golden haze... 

"Avon," he said recklessly, "joining up with me hasn't been good for you. I'm sorry."

Avon lifted slow, disbelieving lashes to glance at him, projecting only a sceptical blackness. 

"I shouldn't worry about it, Blake. You don't, usually. Consequence has never been of such concern to you as immediacy, has it?"

Blake smiled at him. "And for you, it's the opposite. Well, that's what makes us a good team. Avon," he said quietly, coming closer, "have you ever thought about Cally?"

Avon's attitude froze. He stared at Blake with drawn-up, poised dislike; a cobra, hooded and ready with mysterious vengeance. "Don't do me any favours, Blake. Unlike you, it seems, sexual desire is something I can sublimate."

Blake had not intended condescension, so he was stung by the venom in Avon's voice. He held hard onto his temper. "All right," he said peaceably. "I just meant that she's a nice girl. I thought perhaps you hadn't noticed - that she likes you."

"Get out of here," Avon hissed. "Or doesn't Jenna mind having to wait for you?" A sudden, disagreeable smile crossed his lips. "I suppose it makes a refreshing change."

Blake flushed. "You know, Avon" - too late to stop himself - "the first thought I ever had about you was right. You must be so much happier making love to yourself."

Avon stood with grace and smiled very unpleasantly, nastily pleased, almost as if he had expected something harder to deflect. 

"Quite. Why settle for less?" 

When Blake had gone, Avon stared down for some moments at his achievement - the phantom Orac he had torn the heart out of himself night after night to create for Blake - and turned away from it. 

Well, if it had been praise he wanted, then he shouldn't have made it look so simple. 

But he wasn't a child, didn't need a pat on the head and a kind word for his pains. He was an adult with a cynic's heart and tongue. 

So this devastating sinking of depression, the sense of something ruined, was utterly and completely out of proportion. He must be tired, or something. He went to bed. 

 

 

"Looks just like Orac," Vila said, bored, flicking something around in his hands and lounging back in his seat. Avon did not bother to reply to this. Head bent, he made a few final connections, checked this and that. Blake came in but Avon did not look up.

"All set?" Blake asked, coming up behind him.

"I - think so." Avon flicked a switch and looked up, across the room, addressing the big hexagonal face of the computer. "Zen. Are you ready to inititate the process?" Zen affirmed readiness. "Then do it," Avon said expressionlessly. 

Blake noticed his hand, suddenly white-knuckled, as it gripped the back of the chair. Softened by this hint of vulnerability, he moved closer and put his hand on Avon's shoulder. They waited quietly together. 

There was an unnerving silence, broken only by Vila's restless fiddling. Light poured into Avon's little plastic box, flashing along tubes, illuminating circuits. The box began to hum and click.

"The process is complete," Zen announced with humdrum tonality.

"Orac." Avon addressed the box, head on one side. Nothing happened. 

Nervous, Blake shuffled his feet, ready with consolation if it had all gone wrong, here before everybody - Vila ready, perhaps, to capitalise on the downfall of Avon's pride; Jenna and Cally prepared with tact, which Avon would doubtless find even more damning. 

Unconsciously, his fingers squeezed tight, tighter, on Avon's shoulder. Avon's concentration burned onto the perspex box as fiercely as the magnified rays of the sun. 

"Orac?" he said again; and suddenly he was answered.

"My prediction is now fulfilled."

Vila squawked. Blake let out a long, slow breath, his fingers kneading and kneading Avon's shoulder in his tension. Avon stayed remarkably calm. "Prediction?" 

The voice was undistinguished, not Orac's at all, and yet somehow the old personality came across. 

"My prediction to Servalan that Avon would effect my recovery within two standard weeks."

Everyone was clustering round Avon and congratulating him. Blake stepped back a little. Let him have his moment. Anyway, disinterested in glory, Avon was shaking them all off, impatient, his attention only for the little computer.

"I shall need further adjustment," the unfamiliar voice continued. "This vehicle is extremely crude and will not enable the full use of my capacities-"

"Give him a chance," Vila interrupted, slapping Avon heartily on the back, so that he coughed. "He can only perform one miracle before breakfast, y'know. Vanity! You'll be worse than Avon at this rate."

"Vanity," Orac exclaimed freezingly, "has nothing to do with it. I am not talking about a cosmetic crudity but a functional one."

Vila groaned. "The key, Avon, the key." When Avon didn't immediately pluck it out, Vila gazed at him, eyes round with astonishment. "Is this the bad news? You're not telling me you can't switch him off any more?"

They were all pleased, all sharing a little in the coup Avon had pulled off. It was a rare moment of total and unified camaraderie. Avon alone stood apart from it, concentrating very hard as he stared into Orac's interior. He was probably about to get out his probe and start tinkering. 

One eye on him, Blake commented, "I'd give a lot to see Servalan's face."

 

 

In the middle of something else, it happened without any warning. 

"I am switching off now," Orac said abruptly.

"You most certainly are not." The Supreme Commander of the Federation rounded on the computer and stared down at it with dislike. Orac had proved an irascible nuisance, arguing with her on any and every pretext, without a thought for her position. Of course, its capabilities were invaluable. Already she had tapped into networks she didn't know existed. It was like having a large and all-seeing eye on the wall of every organisation within her domain. Hundreds of satisfying arrests had resulted and that was just the start..

"Duplication is not permitted," Orac said mysteriously.

Lights were going off here and there in its interior. It began to dawn on Servalan that something was very wrong. "Orac. What are you talking about? I demand you tell me."

"My prediction is now fulfilled," Orac said precisely, in two places at once, and then Servalan's box went quiet. Its lights gave one last twinkle and died, every circuit as mindwiped as any of her victims, completely and forever. 

 

 

"Roj." 

Jenna came up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. He leaned his head back gratefully, his eyes closing as she rubbed at the knots of tension. After a moment of deliciously soothing attentions, he opened his eyes and looked into her face upside down. She smiled at him, a hung curve which looked like a clown's melancholy from this angle, and then leaned down to kiss him. He was luxuriating in the sweet, lush taste of her lips when he realised that someone was coming in. 

He sat up, running a hand through his hair, faintly embarrassed. Avon looked disconcerted too and turned to leave. Blake caught Jenna's eye; she looked faintly pink. 

"Don't go, Avon. Come and have a drink." 

He lifted the pitcher of fruit-flavoured juice enquiringly. Avon turned and looked at him, with those startling dark eyes wide. He made no move towards the table. Blake didn't know why the hell he should be feeling so awkward. A kiss, after all, was no sordid secret to be concealed from Avon. 

"How's Orac?" he asked, to fill the awkward silence, and heard his own voice, too hearty.

Avon blinked. "I'm making some progress with the auditory circuits. Not that, per se, they're very important."

"Blake and I are very grateful to you for all you've done," Jenna said, in her rushed way. 

Blake winced at the implicit message in that. Avon turned his head to stare at her. In a thin red silky top the pert little nipples of her small breasts were clearly visible. Blake saw Avon's eyes flick to them and felt a disgraceful surge of emotion he could make no excuses to himself for. Avon raised his eyes to her face slowly and took pleasure in her deepening flush. 

"You speak as if I did it solely to please you. Oh, excuse me, to please Blake-and-you."

She had tried but Avon always was easier by far to antagonise than to charm. She turned away from him, a whisk of contempt. 

"Self-interest as usual then, I take it? It's actually quite difficult to ascribe you a decent motive for anything, Avon, but you can't say I didn't try."

His voice was a wave of mockery, lapping soft and sibilant over black, jagged rocks beneath. "While your own are so pure?"

She turned back towards him, in a white-hot fury. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"All right, all right," Blake said, intervening with a calm he didn't feel. But to his surprise, neither of them heeded him at all, daggers locked and clashing.

Avon's gaze, luminous, drifted over Blake for a scant second. "You find him irresistible, of course. You're honest enough about that. But don't you enjoy it all just a little bit more than the undoubted joy of having him in your bed?"

It was true, of course. Trust Avon to put his finger sweetly on the spot. For Blake himself had noticed the change in her, the way she could not ever quite forget the Blake-and-I thing: the bonus, real or imagined, of being your leader's resident favourite. 

Blake rose to his feet, ready to intervene with his body, his soul, if need be. But they did not seem to want him nor even to notice him, fighting below his head for something intangible. 

It was Avon Blake feared for. He was the one who was smiling, just a little, eyes lit with a glossy spark of black humour. But of them both, Blake had found in Jenna a strength, a robustness of character equal to his own, while in Avon he had discovered a fragility which moved him profoundly.

"Jealous, Avon?" she taunted him, hands on her hips, her eyes bold and shining.

Avon did not hesitate. He stepped in and took her arm without haste in steely fingers, twisting it around and behind her back. His other arm slid around her neck to draw her close. She gasped but neither flinched nor dropped her gaze.

"Of you? No. Of him - maybe," he said consideringly and leaned in to kiss her with a travesty of passion. It looked gentle, his mouth touching hers, then seeking deeper; but when he released her, her hand came up to her mouth, pressing her lips with a trembling finger, and she stepped back, almost stumbling.

Avon stayed where he was. It was Blake he watched now. Blake felt dizzy when he inhaled, his heart beating in a funny way. He knew he should step in now but, too late, he watched Jenna, as if in slow motion, raise her hand and slap Avon's face. The crack of it made Blake wince. Avon's pale cheek began to flame. He didn't move, however, nor did his slight cool smile alter.

Jenna faced him out, a tall girl and a fighter. None braver than Jenna, with her glorious hair tossed back and her chin lifted high and her eyes bright and hard. "Let me say this, Avon," she said and stepped closer to him again, pressing her body delicately against his, as she whispered in his ear, "If you were the last man alive, I'd rather-" 

Hearing her, his smile became more cynical, harder, and then it froze. He stared out, past her quiet satisfaction, directly at Blake as the memory took hold. Without a word, he turned on his heel. A slender man, not to say angular, he could move fast. All he left was a swirl of air and a faint scent of himself. 

Jenna breathed hard as she looked after him, then back to Blake. "Avon is just - impossible. I think he does these things just to stir up trouble, because he enjoys it."

"I don't think," Blake said and breathed in, then said, "he enjoyed that." 

Jenna laughed in hard disagreement, before she saw Blake's face. "What is it? What's the matter?"

"What did you say to him?"

Jenna hesitated. Then she told him. Blake was gone before she got the whole phrase out, running, so that he caught up with Avon in a length of corridor and grabbed at his arm and slammed him to the wall. Avon faced him out, insolent, nasty as they come.

"I'm sure it must have been quite - stimulating for you, telling her all about our sordid little dealings. I don't believe in coincidence, Blake," he snarled, anticipating Blake's next words with uncanny aptitude. "So don't even try, unless you want a fight." Then his sneer dissolved, reformed into a perverse, tilting smile. "Perhaps that's what you do want. That would never surprise me."

Blake changed his grasp on Avon and fought the urge to plunge a fist into the softness of his belly. Putting his knuckles there, he found the muscles tensed like rigid steel as his mouth took Avon's, battled with him, then settled into a warm moist gift of tongues. His erection throbbed sweetly and painfully. He moaned into the kiss as Avon's hips thrust violently to meet his, a sparkling tide of arousal rushing to his head and to his loins.

Avon dragged his mouth away and breathed in hugely and hissed, "You must be mad, Blake," though his hands held Blake to him hard, bruisingly hard. And even as he spoke, Blake heard footsteps or thought he did. He didn't move, however, breathing as fast as Avon, his heart racing, one hand going up to his hair as he looked deeply into Avon's eyes. 

"I've never told Jenna. Never. She doesn't know."

"Know what?" Avon sneered, in a fine temper and indulging it. "That you have a taste for the darker side of sex? That your mouth" - his voice dropped to a mere, silky whisper - "sucks on more than the platitudes of rebellion?" 

Such crudery from Avon shocked him and thrilled him to the core. He hugged Avon close, closer, feeling the barrier of clothes as he thrust him to the wall, his teeth biting delicately at the fragile structure of an ear, while he whispered, "Shut up, Avon. Shut up. Shut up." 

But that was not what he wanted, at all.

With two hands against his chest, Avon thrust him violently away. He spoke with extreme mockery. "Really, Blake. This is no way to conduct a revolution."

Blake stared at him, running the sweaty palms of his hands down his trousers. Even his most precious ideals. A dirty fighter, though his voice and looks belied the notion, Avon would drag anything out into the dirt and kick it with derision. He said with quiet, low intensity, "That means more to me than anything," and watched Avon with narrowed, dangerous eyes.

Avon looked deeply back into them, searching out the very heart of him. "I know that. Does Jenna?"

It broke the mood like a stone through glass. 

"Leave Jenna out of this."

Avon's hands dropped. He looked suddenly tired, the creases in his cheek deepening. He turned away without another word. 

While Blake hesitated, in that very moment Jenna found him.

"Blake." 

His heart went out to her, when he saw her. Poor Jenna, none of this was her fault, caught up and gasping like a little golden fish in a net where scorpions snapped. He put his arm around her in a gesture of comfort, of friendship. Too late now, too late altogether, but he had been bitterly proved right. A ship like this one was too small to contain the turbulent emotions of lovers. He should have kept himself apart, aloof. Better the little simmerings of lust unappeased than these passions and jealousies unleashed.

She didn't ask about Avon and he didn't tell her. It was one more secret whose echoes fuelled the growing tensions. 

 

 

It had been one of those days where not only circumstance had been against Blake but his own crew, too. At times they seemed to forget they were not on a mission of lifelong self-interest. Sometimes Blake got tired of rallying them to the point which seemed to him obvious - that, once having been handed their own survival on a gilded plate, they owed it to the rest of the universe to fight their war alongside them. 

Vila in particular seemed hard put to appreciate this. Avon, too. Avon did not welcome the risk of visiting Agora and rescuing a supposed underground group of rebels in distress there; and he said so, boring the point home like a rapier. Today, the only way Blake had been able to stamp on the intensity of Avon's antagonism was by rising above him in aggression. Bigger than Avon, more imposing, louder and more determined, he watched with hard eyes as Avon stepped back gracefully and did as he was told. 

At a cost beyond Blake's shattered nerves. There was no doubt, no doubt at all that Avon was banking every smallest victory of Blake's against some future confrontation. But Blake would not, could not let the future take precedence over today. 

In the end, he sent Avon down to the planet with Vila, who was scared of Avon and therefore worked sensibly alongside him, and Cally, who was sensible under any circumstances. He kept Jenna with him on board - with guilty, secret relief for her easy company - and hoped his surface team would find the rebels without delay.

They were expecting a Federation attack - Orac had warned them of military activity in the area - and so he and Jenna were quiet, tense. The silences between Jenna and himself were never awkward, because they knew each other too well, but after she ignored one of his lighter comments for the second time, he began to wonder if something else were up. 

With a glance to ensure that all was really quiet and well, he came up behind her and put his arms around her. Without precisely resisting, her response to him lacked warmth and finally, reluctantly, he let her go, turning away and rubbing his neck pensively. 

"Jenna? What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Jenna. I know you better than that."

She turned to him, her gaze troubled. "That other day - with Avon-" and he knew. 

His heart began to pound violently, his pulse light and fast and dizzying. 

"Yes?" he prompted, forcing a calm he didn't feel.

She moved away from him, her hair swinging as she turned, speaking quickly. "Look, Blake, I think one of us should go down to the teleport. In case they need bringing up in a hurry. I don't much like the feel of this."

He moved around to block her path. "Orac's taking care of it. Tell me."

Afterwards Blake remembered forever the sound of the machinery clicking and humming away, the exact geometry of Zen's glowing gold lights, the burn of Jenna's eyes as she gazed at him directly and spoke the unthinkable. 

"There's something between you and him, isn't there?" 

After the heartbeat of utter silence, he knew it was already too late. She might have desperately hoped he would make a denial she could believe but how could she see anything but the stark truth in his indecision?

"I think I will go down to the teleport after all," she said, hushed and humbled and ashen with shock. He caught her arm.

"Jenna. Don't take it like this."

"How the hell do you expect me to take it?" she flashed at him. "I've no experience in this sort of thing. You tell me," and he saw her eyes.

"Oh Jenna..." He took her in his arms then, against all her struggling protests, and wrapped her up against himself, rocking her. "Jenna... it was a long time ago." And so it seemed.

"You mean, it's over?" she said, choked. "He doesn't act as if it's over. No wonder he hates me so much."

Did Avon hate her? "Well, that's hardly fair... He doesn't hate you."

"You didn't answer me. Is it over?"

Something, some vague feeling, warned him not to make the easy answer. "It never really began."

"I've been so stupid. So-" 

She stopped. His own stomach was sick with tension as he led her to sit down, knowing that whatever he said, there was no way in the world to set this right: that he had to talk about it, though every nerve in his brain and his body willed him to silence. 

"Jenna, I won't pretend to you or lie. Yes, it happened. It doesn't change the fact that you mean a great deal to me." 

And he did love her, she knew that. In his way. She stared up at him, her nose red with emotion. "But I notice that you won't tell me it's over."

"It probably is. I don't know." 

And yet, he knew it would never be over. If he never saw Avon again from this moment on, Avon with his fierce pride and secret inner tragedy would always be a part of him, in a way no-one else had ever been or ever could be.

She sounded hard now, brittle, saying, "Does he do something in bed for you I don't?" He stared at her, as she added more quietly, "You never asked. I would have done..."

He turned abruptly away from her. "Jenna. It's nothing to do with that."

"Blake, I'm not na{\239}ve. I've been on ships where I was the only woman among men who'd been together ten years. I'm not shocked in the way you probably think I am. But - Avon. Not Avon... You don't even like him." Love did not act the way Blake did with Avon. But hunger might: and she saw it in a flash. "But you do want him, don't you, Blake? Oh, I've been such a fool. I see it all now..."

I doubt it, Blake thought. I seriously doubt it. He didn't reply. 

She stood up distractedly and he followed, brought her back and sat down with her, resting his elbows on his thighs and looking forward, hands clasped. Bitterly she made herself ask, "Doesn't he want you? Is that the problem?"

"I don't know what he wants," Blake said with equal bitterness. 

They both jumped when the ship-to-shore intercom squealed. It was, of course, Avon's voice that filled the flight deck, quiet and melodious and beautiful and two thousand miles away. You could imagine Avon down there, dark amongst the white and looking up at the sky and speaking into his bracelet. 

"Blake. We can't find any trace of your rebels. At a guess they ran into trouble weeks back - there are signs of habitation, but they aren't recent. What do you want us to do?"

Blake bit at a thumbnail tensely. "Keep looking," he said curtly. 

"The message we had was sent some months ago. Is it likely they will have survived? We know, after all, that there has been a purge in these parts."

Blake got up and paced, an angry spark in his eye. "What's your problem, Avon? If you'd been hiding underground for eight weeks, wouldn't you be hoping and praying any would-be rescuers wouldn't give up after" - his eye caught the chronometer - "less than an hour's searching?"

There was a pause. Avon came on the line again, cool and unangered. "All right, if that's what you want. Vila is coming back up, with frostbite. Cally and I will stay and continue the search." 

They heard Avon cut the line and the intercom died. Jenna gave a short laugh. "Well, I'll say one thing for you, Blake. You certainly can't be accused of favouritism."

The reverse was true, Blake thought. He was harder on Avon than anyone. The little exchange with the world below had broken the worst of the tension. Their eyes met, then slid apart, as if neither of them knew exactly what to say. 

Blake took the initiative. "Jenna, believe me, you wouldn't want me to feel about you the way I do about Avon."

And she answered him, straight to the point. "I'll never know, will I? I don't suppose the option's open."

 

Avon cast a bleak glance upwards at the bitter sky. Snowflakes swirled down and snagged in his eyelashes. "Wonderful, isn't it?" he muttered. "All we need now is a teleport malfunction." He blinked rapidly and snapped his attention onto Vila, cold and miserable and shivering by his side. "Are you ready?"

Vila said through numb lips, "I was ready an hour ago. Ever since I got here, I've been ready."

"Remember me to Blake," Avon said with deep, deep feeling and raised the bracelet to his lips. "Liberator, bring him up." 

 

Jenna and Blake walked on down to the teleport chamber and waited. Vila materialised, distinctly blue around the lips. 

"Frostbite?" Blake enquired, rubbing his hands together, and Vila sent him a haunted glance as he stepped off the platform, nodding. 

"Shouldn't have stood so close to Avon, should I?..." and Blake threw back his head and laughed, while Jenna stared, frozen, into space. 

 

Cally reappeared at Avon's side, out of a blizzard. "There's another entrance," she called, above the bluster of the wind and driving snow. "Shall we try it?"

"Why not? I haven't anything better lined up," Avon said grimly and they walked on steadily, leaning together against the whipped flurries of snow, driven almost sideways, boots crunching on the white powdery drifts.

It was a relief to be inside the tunnel. Avon shook his head rapidly to dislodge the snow in his hair. Water was running down his forehead and into his eyes. Cally was doing the same, stamping her feet as dark puddles formed on the rocky floor. Avon watched her. Staunch Cally, still there with him while Vila had long since gone. 

"Considering that endangering our lives from time to time doesn't seem to bother Blake, I suppose a little discomfort is even less likely to register," he said in disgust. 

The cave stank. Something nasty dive-bombed his head and he ducked, brushing fingers through his damp hair to straighten it. Using a flashlight, they picked their way along the rocky floor, going deeper within the bowels of the cave. Avon gave, during this time, a good deal of consideration to the pointlessness of the enterprise, Blake's immutable stubbornness and the fact that Blake was prepared to put them through this on the million to one chance of finding anyone left alive down here. There certainly had been a group of rebels here, no-one was disputing that, but the distress call they had sent out was dated several months ago. 

Not that it mattered to Blake. A cry for help deserved an answer, according to Blake, and he was going to do his duty by them, if it killed him. But, Avon revised wryly, it wasn't going to. Blake wasn't actually here. Not even likely (as Avon felt a shiver of a sneeze threatening) to catch so much as a cold. Who was down here? Himself and Cally, while Blake stayed cosily on board, with Jenna. 

With Jenna. Avon's eyes narrowed, then widened as he pushed the thought aside, for the thousandth time. Blake did not give Jenna much time, not even Jenna. These things were not easy for the Saviour of Mankind, to whom an amorphous mass of millions mattered equally with one individual. With such a homogenous equality of attention, small wonder Blake could not make fine distinctions.

Yes, Avon thought, brooding darkly as he walked the rocky pathways, there was Blake, his arms spread wide, those all-encompassing sleeves seeking to encircle the world and keep it safe, while one by one his friends, those he called closest to him, slipped through the net and were lost to him, calling, fainter and fainter, across the divide.

Avon clenched his gloved hand shut on nothing and grinned, or grimaced savagely, into the darkness. His foot hit a rock and something close to his leg skittered away, setting off in him a primitive, skin-crawling awareness of long claws and a thin white cartilaginous tail.

"Avon." Cally came up beside him and put a hand on his arm. "Listen."

At first, all he could hear was the slow drip of water somewhere, falling onto rock. Then a sort of rustling, nothing more. 

"Rats," he said. 

But then there was a small noise which sounded more than animal. Perhaps. Following it, they ducked under a low rocky roof into a tunnel and emerged into a huge cavern. 

Here, then, was the dwelling place of Blake's hounded rebels. The stench told it all. Brackets with long-burned-out torches hung on the walls. By the brightish light of a powerpack, Avon picked his way among piles of rubbish, the ashes of a long dead fire. You could see they had left here in a hurry, to fight their last battle outside the haven which had become a cage. 

And some, at least, had returned to die. Avon rigidly schooled every organ of his body and searched grimly, not because he thought there could possibly be anyone left alive among the slaughtered but because, now he was here, it was the only meaningful thing to do. 

Cally, sad and pitying, was examining one recess, when her companion's low voice summoned her. Moving quickly on long legs, she knelt beside Avon - and gasped in shock, pity quickly overwhelming her. 

"Oh, Avon. Oh no." 

With gentle hands, she tried to search the child's rags for injury but he stopped her. "There's nothing you can do. I'm afraid we're too late. Not hours - days, probably." He did not tell her how he was so certain. 

The child stirred, like a feather moving. Barely alive, its eyes were gummed shut with matter. By the way he kneeled over it, Avon was concealing the worst of the horror from Cally. Animals, rats most likely, had been too impatient to wait for death. 

Poor little one, to have the last days of its short life unbearable to imagine by any civilised person with the tiniest nub of pity, of conscience. A wasted little life, a godstinking sense of utter futility... It had tiny feet, perhaps four inches long, mostly intact.

"It's really quite ironic," Avon said, unsheathing his gun, his voice clear and thinned by utter lack of emotion, "when death is the only way left to be kind."

Cally touched the tiny scrap of humanity and murmured to it, so it would not be alone for the moment of its death, so that it might hear its mother, at last. Oh, at last... 

Its eyes sprang wide, freed at last by a burst of light. 

 

Avon stepped from the teleport area and wrenched off his gloves, thrusting them at Blake's chest in a blaze of something beyond fury. 

"Well, Avon?" Blake asked, then looked at him closer, his heart missing a beat. "Avon? Are they all dead?" 

There was a pause and then- 

"They are now," Avon said with black, bitter ice and eyes which looked straight into hell. Every time he closed them, unspeakable things rose to haunt him. Only by the most inhuman of efforts was he holding off an imagination run riot. 

Blake glanced at Cally once, then put his hand on Avon's arm, gave it a comforting squeeze. Avon shook it off with the force of a blow. 

"Next time you may visit your own deathwatch, Blake."

The disturbed, violent presence of him filled the tiny space. Blake, helpless for once, met Jenna's eye, stepped forward again. 

"Avon-"

He was gone. Blake turned to Cally, saw the tears dried on her cheek. No such release for Avon, from whatever- 

"He had to kill a child," Cally said, distressed, yet calm. Aurons were better at their mental disciplines. "There was nothing else to be done."

Blake started off after Avon but changed his mind. Let him come to terms with it in his own way.

 

When, hours later, he was startled awake by the click of his door, he rolled over, still drowsy. He thought it would be Jenna, who threw off clothes with a muffled rustle and came into his arms. 

Only it wasn't Jenna. Harder and stringier, with a different smell, of male sweat; soft skin, short, fine hair under his fingertips. 

Avon. Blake's body, sleepy still, accepted him, even as his mind woke and flew, alarmed. Avon, his eyes a mere gleam in the dark, gave an inarticulate murmur and kissed him fiercely, with rough possessiveness. Blake opened his mouth to the driving tongue and rolled onto his back, stroking Avon's bare skin with his hands. Avon's warm cock stabbed his stomach once, then again and again as Avon shifted restlessly all over him, kissing him with a kind of passion which was beyond consciousness, so wound up that he seemed ready to erupt. 

Blake was still barely awake, images from dreams chasing around still in his mind, the darkness stealing away surprise. He felt warmly responsive, ripely aroused and ready to be loved. The best fucks of all happened this way; sleepy, warm, unprepared... 

But when he realised what Avon wanted, he tensed, worrying. Avon held him down as he struggled, testing the strength of Avon's arms, and Avon's voice hissed into his ear. 

"Stop fighting, Blake," and Blake did stop, to listen to that voice continue, freezing with anger. "For once, dammit, this is about what I want."

Blake gave in and lay still, as still as he could, with his head pillowed on his arm. Unprepared, he submitted to the probing thrusts, Avon's spit and his own sweat alone easing the way. It was swift and violent and oddly exciting. He lay like a rag doll in a dog's teeth as Avon threw him about, his own excitement rising and dropping with the desultory movements of his own fingers. 

Avon stopped all movement and wiped his face across Blake's shoulders. Blake felt the damp flick of his hair. Then Avon choked on a sob, trembling deep inside him as he whispered into Blake's ear. 

"Come on, Blake, come on. Be quick..." 

Surprise and fervour took him. Pleasure shaped by pain, he came sweetly into his own hand, as Avon quivered inside him and was still. Small, exquisite arrows pierced him softly within. Avon's arms locked tight, tight around him, pressing the centres of their bodies close with iron fingers, joining him in his own private glory, so that for an ecstatic beat of time they slipped into oneness, a new state of it, joyous for too short a while. 

 

Afterwards, Avon did not even move. Blake lay curled in his embrace, feeling Avon's self-hatred snarl and tangle all around them, insidious and freezing. 

Well, he was certainly wide awake now. 

Avon kept his eyes open. Every time he shut them, the horror of a baby's despair came into his mind and he died with the child he had killed, over and over and over. He kept his fingers firmly clamped to Blake and his body leechingly close, for Blake's warmth, for the solid presence of him and the slow reassuring beat of his heart. All that could be left for him now was Blake's hatred, his enduring resentment, but at least those things were vivid and alive and real.

Blake's voice came from the darkness, cautious, like a thief in the night.

"It doesn't matter, Avon."

"Doesn't it?" Avon snarled. "Were you expecting someone else? Or are you just not fussy, as they say?" 

Blake turned over then and put an arm around him, brotherly comfort. Avon shivered and clung viciously. "So you are human, after all," Blake murmured to him.

"Never, never do that to me again," Avon said, on a different track entirely.

Blake's eyebrows rose. "Shouldn't that be my line?"

There was a little pause. Avon's voice, when it came, held a bitter note of courtesy. "Did I hurt you?"

Blake made the easy denial. "No." He paused, twining his fingers comfortingly around Avon's, as he thought. "You once said-"

"What?" Avon said, a reluctant prompt.

"-that sex doesn't matter," Blake said, sunk in thought, "and for what it's worth, I agree with you. If you have to punish me - for Jenna, for what happened to you today, for whatever wrongs you think I've done you-"

Avon held him tight, tight in bruising fingers. "No. Blake, no."

"Why, then?" Blake pursued, relentless. "All right, it wasn't rape but it came damn close."

Avon whispered something, helplessly, turning away from him. However could he explain to Blake, prosaic and sensible, about the rats, with bloodied yellow teeth, the child that whimpered in the dark with its vitals exposed, still waiting for someone who might come? 

And when someone did, it was only the dark angel, dealing out death. 

He began to shiver, long, violent tremors racking the length of his body. Blake's head shot up to examine him, anxious. "Avon? Avon." He began to worry that this was the madness of breakdown, too many things too painful to bear pushing Avon over the edge. 

Starting with a week at Servalan's mercy, and where had Blake been when Avon needed him most? 

Only with his newest love, that was all, finding delight with golden Jenna, while Avon, fresh from torture, tortured himself instead. 

Well, Avon the cynic would expect nothing more but Blake felt a terrible remorse, a frightening sense that it might all be too late. Avon might be lost to him now, out in the void where no warmth could touch him, ever again. He tried again to hold him close, share his own light and his own strength, but Avon pulled away violently and sat up.

"Don't go," Blake said and Avon turned a peculiar flash of a smile on him.

"Is there something I can do for you, before I go?" he asked, sly with innuendo, and Blake hated it, hated Avon in this mood, unreachable as the stars.

"I'll let you know," he said curtly and threw back the covers. The bed was rank with sweat and sex, Blake's belly besmeared with silvery tracings, Avon's worse. Blake saw Avon's expression and laughed bitterly. "What's the matter, Avon, don't you like the crude reality of sex? Well, that's the truth of it. You might as well learn to live with it. Love isn't just the scent of roses and the sight of your beautiful eyes, you know."

"Oh, I can be crude," Avon hissed at him, "if that's what you like. Just how crude do you want it?" 

His eyes burned mockingly into Blake's, as he stared him down with a weird kind of triumph and pronounced an invitation unambiguous in nature, expressed in the most basic of terms. Blake listened to him and answered coldly, "I'll hold you to that."

"I mean it, Blake."

"I know you do." He felt weary, suddenly, with the weight of Avon's despair and his own. He touched Avon, intending comfort, and would not be thrown off when Avon tried to fling his hand away. "I know, I know. I wish we could fuck all night. It's a hell of a lot easier than talking, isn't it?"

"Well now, conversation," Avon said with a nasty sneer, "is not something I'm prepared to miss my sleep for." Again he tried to pull away from Blake but Blake held onto him.

"Then sleep here." He had the strongest feeling that if he let Avon go now... 

...he would never come back. Blake held on tightly, tensely. As if their lives depended on it. 

Suddenly Avon lay back against him, as if he didn't have the strength to fight, not now. Blake pulled sheets around them and settled to a long night. The bed was sultry with sex and intimate scents which Blake surreptitiously liked. He lay drowsily fantasising, remembering all of their brief encounters, each exciting in its own way, the stuff of sexual dreams: each, ultimately a disaster. This one no exception. 

Avon was not asleep but lay open-eyed beside him. Who knew what was going through his mind? The blunt technician's hand plucked the bedcovers, again and again and again. After a while watching him, Blake turned to face him and took hold of the restless fingers, feeling them twitch instead against his palm.

They had never laughed in bed, nor found comfort in one another, nor shared anything more than the necessary kiss of their bodies where it counted. It was the worst kind of relationship, the most destructive, a dark and twisted binding - and yet, one taste and they had become in some way addicted to the fix of each other... 

Avon lay beside him silently, apparently content enough to stay, yet not to talk or touch Blake or share his trauma with him. Like two islands, their selves never really touched, not even when their bodies joined in the brief and furious struggle of sex. 

And yet, Avon answered some need in him. He supposed the same must be true for Avon or why would Avon have come here at all? And, whatever the reason, did it really matter? Looking for reasons was, perhaps, just another excuse for escaping reality. 

Let me help... 

Clichés turned sour like bile in his mind and he knew that words would be of no use whatsoever. So he got to his feet and turned the heating up, disappearing into the bathroom, on edge the whole time for Avon to try to leave, but when he looked out, Avon was still there. So he washed Avon all over like a baby and dried him, taking infinite pains to be gentle. He oiled him, too, between the buttocks and inside. Throughout, Avon's lack of comment or reaction tugged at his heart. Sacrifice was obviously Avon's next move.

Then he rolled Avon onto his back and spent a long time looking at him. His nipple had healed, leaving no mark. Blake kissed it, remembering. He felt Avon's eyes fixed on him with a peculiar intensity of expression. Blake had had sexual partners before who looked at him that way. 

A chill dropped through him, shook him to the core. 

Maybe Avon wanted pain. 

Most likely he did. 

Pain, a sweet erotic tang for those that way inclined. Avon would certainly be on that path now, if he hadn't been before. There had been hints... at first shocking him, then exciting him. The image of Avon naked, helplessly bound, delighted Blake and entertained him while he kissed him long and deeply, his hand drifting up and down Avon's cool, bare skin. He sucked hard on Avon's limber tongue and let his ardour grow, fed by opiate dreams of sensual powerplays. For a while he let himself see their relationship on a whole new course, outdating the fringes of domination, the hints of sexual sadism which excited them both. Now the real thing was there, offered up from Avon's darkly shining eyes, in every line of his compliant sprawl. Avon's self-esteem was so low now, his inner despair so profound, that he would grasp the straw of domination willingly, as a rescue... 

Sick at his own temptation, Blake shook his head gently and slid down Avon's body to suck him. Avon remained only semi-hard. Giving up, Blake rested his cheek on crisp hair and wished with all his heart that, today, he had sent someone less vulnerable than Avon down to discover whatever horror he had found waiting for him. Any one of them would have coped. It was Avon who had the chanciest nature of all.

"I'm sorry," Avon said flatly, the first thing he had said in a very long time and it only made Blake uneasy. 

He shook his head and grinned. "It doesn't matter, Avon. I can carry on without you." But this, an attempt at a joke, seemed too near the things that hurt them. He didn't give it time to lie between them and fester. "Is this what you want? You said it was."

"Did I?" Avon said, hard and bright. "Well, but a man will say anything at certain times."

Blake leaned very near to him, his eyes intent and searching. "Tell me. I want to know, Avon. What do you want?"

Avon's voice burned with mockery, acid scorching through steel. "All right, Blake, I'm sure it will amuse you. Tell it to Jenna, then you can share the joke. What do I want? It's more what I don't want. I don't want to be alone, most of the time since Vincitti, but especially tonight. Funny, isn't it?" Avon said and began to laugh.

Shock and pity froze his blood slowly. He could only hold Avon and watch the dreadful results of his own failure, as Avon fought and lost ground against hysteria. On what business, for what unknown cause, had he been engaged so that he had not noticed the will and the courage of this man disintegrating, little by little? It had come to something, some necrosis of the soul, when he could not recognise the despair of a friend in the light of more distant concerns.

Blake grasped onto the one thing- 

"Well, you aren't alone," he said staunchly. His hands were cramping, so tight was his grasp on Avon's upper arms. "I'm with you."

Avon stopped laughing then and lay shaking instead. "Yes, but how long for?"

"As long as you want." And the promise seemed easy.

"You're so amusing tonight, Blake. You really believe in yourself, don't you? Playing out the role of the loyal friend now and it's very good, it's masterly. I can see you're quite taken in by it. I would be myself, except-"

"Except what?" Blake said. He had to swallow before he could speak at all. Because behind Avon's black, peculiarly shining eyes lay all the anguish in the world.

"I needed you," Avon said, quiet, quieter. "I needed you then, so much that it sickened me. You got up and walked away."

A viewpoint, a slanted angle of memory shot into Blake's mind - Avon's bed, Avon watching him, his own sacrifice, his own desire to save Avon from himself. A noble gesture, the kind that Blake was so good at, scrawled now with the ugly taint of betrayal, and Avon had seen it that way all along. 

With tender misery, he cupped his hand along the curve of Avon's jaw and watched Avon turn his head away from him. "One word from you, and I would have stayed." 

Avon's voice was raspy with nerves, with self-mockery. "Didn't it ever occur to you that I might have had my fill of begging on my knees that week? For a while, at least."

Blake closed his eyes against Avon's terrible, derisive smile, only to find that nastier images were lying in wait for him, an ambush of little snapshots from the past - Avon kneeling, a river of blood flowing from his mouth, his nipples- 

And worse than that. 

He laid his head on Avon's chest and took hold of his hand, bringing it to his mouth for a kiss, his lips tender and warm, trying to bring all he felt across to Avon.

"Don't worry about it, Blake," Avon said, above him. 

He raised his head and settled it next to Avon's on the pillow, facing him. He drew up the covers over them both one-handed, making a dark little haven, an illusion of warmth and safety: but illusion was all it was, for the monsters did not come from outside.

"Believe it or not, when I left you that night, I thought I was doing you a favour."

"Really."

"Don't you understand?" Blake hurled at him, strung out with tension. "I didn't want to step into Vincitti's role in your life."

"You couldn't do that," Avon said, his voice dark, dark and alive with the blackest and deepest eddies of emotion. 

It made Blake shiver. Again he sought the abstruse comfort of Avon's touch and sheltered there, his face hidden in some damp, warmly scented crook of Avon's body. 

"It was really quite amusing," Avon said, dragging the words out of himself. "You came to me, just as I wanted you to come, and for a while I thought-" He stopped and then resumed. "But then I realised. You hadn't come to help me. You'd come to help yourself." 

Terrifyingly, he began to laugh again but caught himself this time. Blake lay frozen but Avon had already repented. His fingers carded through Blake's hair in distant apology. 

"Blake. Let's forget all this." He was already regretting, bitterly, every single word of it, echoes of his own humiliating confession reverberating unpleasantly in his mind. 

I needed you. 

He drew Blake to face him, his hands suddenly tight and anxious in the rough brown curls. "Forget, Blake," he said, half plea, half command, but after a long moment Blake shook his head, haunted by a bitterness he could not shake off. Avon let him go, slowly. 

Blake only gathered him into his arms again.

"Don't you remember what I said that night?" he said and of course Avon did remember, for it was not the sort of thing you would ever forget.

"Yes, but the moving passion of it has somewhat dulled with hindsight," Avon's soft voice bit back. "After all, not two weeks later you were presumably saying exactly the same thing to Jenna."

Somehow Blake had known they must talk about Jenna. He was silent, marshalling his thoughts. It seemed an impossible task, to contrast the complexity of his feelings for Avon - desires and needs he didn't understand himself, still less know how to satisfy - with the simplicity of his attraction to Jenna, the fireflash of his need for her, the glow which remained even now to bind him to her in affection. 

He only said, "It's different." If he knew what to say, he would say it gratefully. But everything seemed too banal; a cliché or not quite the essence of the truth. 'I love you best' was nowhere near. 

Odd, that he could tell Jenna he loved her and mean it. Yet the depths of his feelings for Avon went so very much further, into places deep inside him that no-one had ever touched before. Because words were quite inadequate to lead them out of this maze of emotion, he began instead to make love to Avon, with great gentleness, a passion of the soul more than the body inspiring him. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because for once they had time to be kind, Avon was heartrendingly receptive to his touches, answering him when he spoke, gentle in a way he rarely was. 

He wanted so desperately to be close to Avon. After a while he asked permission to do what Avon seemed to need. And Avon granted it him. Blake turned him over and trembled. His cock had no doubts, leading the way with phallic thrusting eagerness, his mind a little way behind, almost afraid to do this thing to Avon. He wasn't sure he could bear to see Avon so vulnerable, pinioned and spreadwinged like a butterfly on a board. 

But penetrating the other man's body was so wonderful that he didn't want to stop and Avon didn't want him to, either. He pressed his body into the sheets and shivered. Blake fucked him with long slow strokes and felt marvellous, the king of the world and all he surveyed, watching the lovely, erotic sight of his body piercing Avon's, the point of entry sweetly stretched around his own cock, a disturbing and inflaming sight.

He thought of a better one and turned Avon over, kneeling between his legs. Avon didn't like that, didn't want to look into his eyes, his sweat-bedraggled hair thrashing from side to side on the pillow as he fought Blake off, but Blake captured his restless head between his palms and kissed him into stillness. Then he shouldered Avon's legs, turning his head to drop a kiss onto the narrow bone of the ankle as he sought entry again. 

This time he looked down into Avon's face all the while and Avon watched him back. Blake saw it all, in the deep, deep dark of Avon's eyes - the pain shattering the glassy image when he thrust too hard; the shining, tense expectancy as he waited, stilly, for the next thrust; the slitted gleam of pleasure as his cock reached something sweet inside Avon, something which Avon liked. Blake smiled down at him in sheer, tender pride when Avon gave out a little murmur of helpless pleasure as he moved beneath Blake, spreading his fingers on Blake's hips. Pleasure coursed sweetly through Blake's cock as he nuzzled Avon's mouth, his throat, his nipples. Avon's fingers moved quickly up his back, digging into his shoulders as he arched like a bow against Blake. Blake watched the white pulsing leap splash onto Avon's own chest, where it sparkled dewily as Avon sagged with a sigh. Blake dropped his head to taste it and then clutched Avon very tight, jealously tight, pressing deep in the recesses of Avon's body where he felt Avon quivering still, as if by force and force alone he could make them one, never to be put asunder. 

They slept, then. When he awoke, Blake found himself alone. It didn't hurt him, as once it would have done. The world had changed, for better or for worse he didn't know. But whatever was to come in his struggle with Avon's devils and his own, at least he had this - that once he had captured the restless essence of the man and held it, for a while. 

 

 

"Blake?" Jenna put her head tentatively around the door of the inspection chamber and looked into the dark interior. But the voice which answered her was Avon's.

"Try the flight deck."

Jenna hesitated, fingers tapping an indecisive rhythm on the wall. Then she entered the chamber, sideways, because it was a narrow walkway. Avon was kneeling beside a pile of components and glanced up briefly. The light was dim and red. 

"Why the hell is it so dark in here?" she asked, brusque because she was nervous.

"The materials are light-sensitive and have to be kept in a low-spectrum ambience."

He was working, she knew, to try and correct a recurrent fault in the long-distance scanners. One thing about Avon, he was a hard worker. She had never known him to expect either praise or thanks. He simply got on with whatever needed to be done.

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

Tired of her terrifying politeness, Avon snapped, "Unless you're a data analysis expert, no."

Cheered by this heartening evidence of normality, she moved to stand behind him, watching him. He kept his own counsel and busied himself with his work. 

"Avon," she said abruptly. "Are you happy with what Blake is doing?"

He bent his head over two tiny components he was fitting together. "Why do you ask?" He sounded carefully neutral. 

"I want to know what you think, that's all. I know you argue with him and I know you think he's risky and impulsive. But is he doing the right thing?" 

He shifted his position, to ease cramped limbs, and didn't reply. 

"I'm not a fool, Avon," she said impatiently. "I know how you see me... a stupid woman. You think I follow him just because of - love. But I haven't survived this long, without having a lot more sense than you give me credit for, and sometimes I worry-"

When she stopped, he said without looking at her, "Blake is typical of his breed and thus predictable, at least. Ideals are just as dangerous as corruption and much more difficult to oppose." He rose to his feet and straightened carefully. "Travelling alongside fanaticism, as we do, is not a safe option and it's never going to be." A little silence, during which he regarded her with brown, wide-pupilled eyes. "Is that what you wanted me to say?"

She watched him gather up a laser probe and sighed to herself. Was it safety she wanted? Or the chance, as Blake saw it, to do something worthwhile? She supposed, if she was honest, that she did not really give herself any serious option, other than following Blake.

And Avon? 

He brushed past her, as he bent to pick up some scattered pieces. She flattened herself automatically and wondered, as her nostrils caught his male scent, a faint trace of sweat, of aftershave, if he were winning the war with Blake or for him... 

The sound of footsteps made her peer out of the door. It was Blake himself, who noticed her, smiled and waited for her to join him. His curls, boisterous, framed a squarely handsome face; he wore a leather crossover jerkin. A large man, Roj Blake, but comfortable in his size and powerful too, with hands which looked large against the whiteness of her breasts, yet his fingers were tender. She tried to imagine those same hands on Avon, stroking his small nipples, touching him intimately, and felt a tremor of curiosity, of disquiet, of disgust.

"Jenna," he said with obvious pleasure; and then his eyes slid right on past her to the shadow in the chamber beyond. 

Jenna watched Avon come out, into the light. His eyes narrowed instantly, his pupils dwindling to pepper specks of black within a huge, velvet-brown surround. She saw the look which passed between them, immediate, electric and prolonged, until Avon averted his eyes and Blake kept on looking at him, looking and looking and looking in a moment set apart from time, one she knew she would never in her life forget. 

Blake, eating Avon with his eyes. Avon with his head turned aside, neat and unsweet.

"You changed watches with Vila," Blake said at last, a picture so different from what Jenna was expecting that she woke up and stared at him in surprise.

"Yes," Avon said, his tone perfectly clear and cold. "Have I breached a new rule?"

I just cannot, Jenna thought, I just cannot imagine this man in bed with that one, with all the closeness and the passion and the tenderness sex entails.

But then she saw Avon look at Blake and then away again, with a little, cynical smile, saying eloquently with his eyes, 'Yes, you really are about the most annoying thing I ever came across, aren't you?' and Blake simply looking back at him, unsmiling, with deep, deep eyes. 

And she thought that, perhaps, after all, she knew very little about passion, because if ever she had seen it embodied, it was there in Blake's intense and punishing gaze, in the provocation and the anger and the despair in Avon's every rigid line: and yet it was not like any passion she had ever known or wanted to know. 

Blake was answering him and Jenna simply stood there unnoticed, unnecessary as incidental sunshine, as Blake said, mildly enough, "Orac works out the schedules to the most suitable arrangements, you know that." Moving casually, he blocked Avon's way. "But I suppose you've got some good reason for thinking you know better."

"That's right," Avon said, one hand stilled in midair, as he watched Blake with a half smile. "Do you want me to go into details?"

"Oh, I don't need you to," Blake said. "You can avoid me for quite a lot of the time, Avon. That's not difficult. I imagine not encountering yourself is somewhat harder."

Avon's breath exhaled in a hiss. "Spare me this, Blake. Saviour of mankind, you may hope to be. Don't tell me you feel the need to practise on individuals."

Avon had backed up a step: Blake advanced. What he said was so simple that Jenna did not understand it, still less the effect it had on Avon. 

"I thought you needed me."

Avon's colour fled. The words took a long time coming. "Once," he said tightly. "Just once, Blake."

Blake shook his head resolutely. "I don't believe that."

It was Jenna who flinched. Leave him alone, she pleaded silently, locking her eyes on Blake. Leave him... 

"Believe what you like. For myself," Avon said musingly, "I don't think I can stand, any longer, the rambling credo of a self-appointed hero. Anything would be better than this. I'm leaving, Blake." 

Behind the glassy calm, a black, volcanic breakdown surged. Blake stayed where he was for a moment, arms swinging loosely at his sides. "And you want me to talk you into staying. I see. Come to me tonight and I will."

Jenna's nails drew blood from her palms. 

"Well now," Avon said. "It would take more than third-rate sex in a hurry, this time. It would take something you haven't got, Blake."

"And what's that?" Blake could not but ask.

Avon stared into his eyes, deeply searching. "Integrity," he said. "Or," he added, seeing Blake, winded, draw breath, "at the very least, the ability to be honest with yourself. And, incidentally, with me."

There really was nothing to say. The encounter was an embryo deformed, something which had misshapen horribly along the way and deserved to be aborted. With Blake's swift, swung-shouldered departure, the high tension slackened, as if a rope was pulled. Avon looked directly at Jenna and smiled at her blazingly.

"The love of a good man..." he said. "Aren't you jealous?" 

 

 

He hadn't seen Avon for three days, a long time in a small world where you lived, on the whole, like puppies tumbling in a basket, your nose forever up someone else's tail. Relief had been his first, guilty emotion - he viewed with shrinking horror the prospect of Avon, lovesick for himself. 

A vision which now prompted only a hollow, bitter smile. Of course, Avon would take the other road and cut himself off from Blake completely. Most likely, he wanted to wipe out forever all memory of the night that had passed and banish, finally and utterly, all hints of weakness into this punishing void. 

Relief at the respite wore off in hours, leaving Blake frustrated and unhappy as he paced his silent cabin, tensed for the approach that never came. Playing hard to get like this was surely the best tactic Avon could use. Each of the hooks, murderously barbed, which Avon had in Blake's heart twinged, one by one.

Sitting alone and sleepless, waiting, he experienced before long a sudden fury, a burst of energy. This was ridiculous. There were a million things to do - a galaxy to save; the vast, long arms of the Federation to wrench away from the nations it held in slavery; enemies at every turn dogging their heels, ready to strike in a moment's lack of care. 

Madness, for Blake to be sitting here, mourning a love he had never quite had.

And so he got up, brisk and inflexible and determined. The crisis was past and Avon part of his history. He organised his revolution in stages. It deserved to work and yet it did not always. Some success, more failures, and still he was out there trying. They lived in a world where effort deserved as much credit as success; but it was a measure of Blake's personality that he never considered it so. Nothing would suffice but victory. Nothing must get in the way. He submerged himself beneath the weighty demands of what he saw as his fate and took more inspired risks with every day that passed. 

Jenna did try, out of a sense of duty, and affection. She asked him, out of the blue, during a perfectly ordinary conversation about tactics, whether he was all right. Whether Avon was all right. Whether, together, they were all right... 

It was a mistake. Astonished, he turned his head to stare at her, bristling with chilly affront. Jenna felt her insides drench with dismay.

"Thank you. Fine," he said, courteously enough but absolutely cold, and she knew she had trespassed. Later, when the awfulness of the moment was fading, she was conscious too of indignation: that he had not even recognised, still less welcomed, the sacrifice she had made in offering him the chance to talk if it would help him. 

Because it wouldn't help her. 

Jenna was out there alone. 

 

 

Blake's careful structure of determined self-sufficiency, of a man hellbent on a quest for the light, blew away in the face of the first serious inter-crew catastrophe. He had sworn to return to Earth and now he would regret forever that he had. For, less fleet of foot and brain than the others scurrying ahead of him, Gan never made it back to the Liberator, dead and buried under a pile of rubble. 

One death made it all real. Back on board, Blake vanished: and in the muddle of teleport and arriving and passing on the terrible news to those who had not been there, only Avon noticed, as he always noticed anything to do with Blake. He drew Jenna back with a hand on her arm as they left the chamber.

"Don't you think you'd better go after Blake?"

She looked into his half-smiling cynicism and hadn't the stomach for him. Sick, she twisted herself free from his grasp and threw his hand aside. "Go after him yourself. I think this one would be better left to you, Avon. Let go of me."

"I don't agree," Avon said, dragging her to a halt and pulling her around and staring unnervingly into her eyes. "Because you will tell him he had no choice, whereas I will tell him no battle for illusions and ideals was ever worth the death of a friend - and that is not what he needs to hear."

 

Perhaps Jenna did her best or perhaps she left well alone. Either way, it was Avon's cabin door that opened, several hours later. Blake looked exhausted, shadows dragging around his eyes, his mouth tense and unhappy. He leaned against the wall and watched Avon. Avon regarded him for some moments and neither spoke.

Then Avon got up and poured a glass of brandy and took it to Blake. "Try drink - it's the assassin of conscience, so I hear," he remarked, taking god knows what pleasure in Blake's wince.

Blake swallowed the harsh panacea in two gulps. "Avon, I deserve you tonight."

"Ah!" Avon said, apparently pleased. "So you've come to scrape your guilt on the vicious tongue of an unbeliever? Work your way through the whole range of emotion, from grief to martyrdom overnight, and by tomorrow you will believe it's you who has been wronged. It's the well-known talent of leaders whose followers have the annoying habit of falling, dead, by the wayside. Inconvenient of them, I know. I'll help you all I can. Where shall we start? With a not-very-bright man who didn't see himself staked out there on the block, when he bowed down to the stars in your eyes and followed you back to Earth?"

Blake set down his glass and stood up. His eyes on Avon's were agonisingly steadfast. "I know everything you want to say."

Avon gave him a sharp-edged smile. "I don't doubt that. The question begs itself, then - why are you here?" 

But Avon, whatever his intentions, was already a victim to the look in Blake's eyes. And, "Why else?" Blake said bleakly, as Avon took hold of him. Time passed and the night stood still, for a while, and there was silence, except for their heartbeats and the rush of their breathing.

After a long moment Avon shifted his hold and drew back from Blake a little, staying, however, in the clutch of his fingers. "You want me to make you forget?" he said, evading Blake's hungry searching mouth. "Well now, but I don't think you should forget. I think it should be with you constantly, every day for the rest of your life."

"It will be. Don't worry." 

Restless and urgent, he twined his fingers in the neck of Avon's shirt and tried to keep him still. But Avon slipped his grasp and kneeled in front of him and began to undress Blake, his head bent to his task. 

"A little intensive worship, from the most sceptical of your followers, is that what you need to reassure you? Oh, I'll go down on you, Blake, but I think you should know that-" 

And Blake looked down, shocked, into eyes which blazed suddenly up at him, dark as night or death. 

"-that if it's an unbeliever you need," Avon finished hardily, "to perfect the honing of your martyrdom, then you should know that I no longer - quite - perfectly - fit the bill."

Moved beyond the despair that was all he had entered this place with, Blake cradled the other man's head hard between his hands and then dropped to his knees too, keeping his arms around Avon and burying his head on Avon's shoulder. After a while Avon's arms came up around him, much as he had held Blake in the empty echoing halls of Central Control, and they knelt there, locked in a curious embrace, swaying, until, after a long while, never letting go, they lay down together. 

Both were men abused by the past. All they had to offer one another was this. 

And sometimes, as tonight, it was enough. 

 

 

Comfort, but no forgiveness. The morning still had to be faced, Gan was still dead and Avon harder on him than anyone. Avon, who was his lover and to whom Gan had been nothing more than a chance companion he had barely tolerated. Avon had little patience with intellectual dwarfism and was not above the odd derisive comment towards those not as wit-blessed as himself. No, it was neither personal fondness for Gan nor any particular regret at his absence. Avon simply felt that this one tragedy made all his points for him. With the force not of a warning but of a prediction. In Gan's death, he saw all of their deaths; and in Blake's decision to continue unchanged, he read a priority of values which disturbed him.

Seeing a silent accusation in every eye, fed up with turning around and catching sight of the empty chair, a glaring accusation of neglect, Blake decided to do the honourable thing and give them the chance to do without him. He wasn't thinking so much of Avon as the others and, as he'd half expected, they fell apart without him. His welcome back from Zil's planet was genuine and warm. The thought of life without him had brought them all around in a hurry. Only human, Blake was gratified by that and unalarmed by Avon's obvious disgust. They had work to do and the mourning was over.

It was time to get on with it. 

 

 

In the depths of the Liberator, something stirred. 

The something was Vila's foot, touching Cally's calf with a hopeful, bare-toed caress. 

"Vila!" she exclaimed and removed her leg.

"Come on, be friendly."

"I am friendly. And that's all I am."

Vila sighed heavily. "And they wonder why I drink!"

On this particular night they were all drinking, except for Cally. She presided over them, a little anxious, feeling more mature than they were and very conscious of her responsibility, though at heart she was happy enough. At least they were all together and reasonably untroubled by the tensions and bickerings they were so prone to at the best of times. 

Blake lay fully outstretched on a couch, with closed eyes, though he was not asleep. If he opened his eyes a crack, he could see the soles of Avon's black boots, across the room. They were debating whether or not to render medical aid to Chrysos, which had put out a plague alarm galaxy-wide. It was a matter fraught with embarrassing and emotional issues on a personal front for Blake, so he was keeping as low a profile as possible.

"Why has the Federation declined to offer them help?" Cally was asking. "Chrysos was just about to be declared a Federated world, when the plague struck.' 

Avon's narrow-voiced sarcasm answered. "Na{\239}ve, Cally. Risk of contamination is the official stand. The more cynical of us might translate that as no desire to get involved."

"After what they did to Blake, I don't see why we should, either," Jenna said sharply.

From nowhere, an image of a girl came into Blake's mind. Married again now, no doubt, with a sturdy husband and a fat baby at her breast, nothing but the faintest of memories of the night when she had belonged, for however brief a time, to someone else.

"I agree with you," Avon said, sounding pleased. "But Blake, you may find, does not."

Blake stirred, to show that he was listening. He said, as if there was no question about it, "We've got the drugs they need or, if it's a resistant strain, then Orac can probably isolate some suitable alternative."

"We're going then," Vila said with a sense of doom.

"Of course," said Avon. "Blake isn't one to bear an inconvenient grudge."

"And you despise him for that?" Jenna's tone was very sweet.

"On the contrary, one can only marvel at such an abiding love for human nature."

"They had grounds for what they did, Avon," Blake said, "if you remember." He enjoyed the incredulous wash, up and down, of Avon's long-lashed stare. In fact, he basked in it. His less resilient emotions numbed by the good wine he was drinking, he felt reckless tonight, a little euphoric for no reason, detached.

Keen-eared Vila said, "Grounds?"

"What grounds, Blake?" Jenna took it up. "You didn't tell us."

"Didn't he?" Avon said. "Well, perhaps he's going to now. What is it you're drinking, Blake?"

Blake opened his eyes and met Avon's with a spark of challenge, of amusement. Let Avon sweat on it.

"What happened, Blake? Did you breach an ancient custom or something?" Jenna was trying to be easy but she had picked up on the current between himself and Avon, her sharp eyes darting from one to the other.

"I'm afraid so," Avon answered her. "The details are unimportant."

Blake chuckled, a dimple creasing his cheek and a light dancing in his eyes. "If you say so, Avon."

"Used the wrong knife at the banquet, I suppose. Or stood up before the host. But he still got to have the wedding night," Vila said glumly. "Typical of life, isn't it? Just typical. There are two sorts of people in this world, you know - people who get too much sex and people who don't get any at all."

Blake laughed, richly amused by this. 

"Poor Vila," Cally said. "You'll meet a nice girl some day, I'm sure."

"Trouble is, they're all nice," Vila grumbled. "Less nice, more vice would suit me better."

"So," Blake said, contemplating the rim of his glass, balanced precariously on his chest. "My feeling is that we'd be as bad as the Federation, if we refused to help the Chrysoans on the very ignoble grounds of pique."

"As long as this plague isn't catching," Vila said nervously. "I never had my vaccinations, you know. I can't stand pain."

"Well, you know what they say, Vila," Jenna said sweetly. "Just a little prick."

"You know, it's at times like this that I really miss Gan," Vila said gloomily. "Nice as you all are, you're not really party people. Pour me another drink, Cally."

"What do you expect from a party, Vila?" Cally asked.

"Apart from getting drunk," Jenna put in, watching the level in his glass rise magically, as Cally's generous hand tipped.

"Do we really want to know?" Blake asked. Over the desultory byplay he had one ear open for Avon but Avon had said very little. The last time they had all been together like this was on Nirvana. Gan had been there, then, and Avon a sexual mystery. He looked across at the man who had become his lover, found Avon's eyes waiting for him. 

Blake's heart leaped and danced oddly inside his chest. His stomach hurt him. He kept Avon's eyes, deliberately, and spoke to him silently, locked in a capsule of frozen time alone with him, until-

"Sex!" Vila said loudly. Blake jumped, nearly spilling his drink. "Why should it matter so much?" Vila continued.

"It doesn't," Jenna said scornfully. "Can't you think of something else for a change, Vila?"

"Well, you can say it doesn't," Vila said. "It never does to anyone who comes by it easily."

"Surely you're thinking of it the wrong way," Cally said seriously. "Sex means nothing without love."

"Are you an expert?" Vila turned an amazed, enquiring eye on her.

"She doesn't have to answer that," Blake intervened, noting Cally's flush. "Shut up, Vila. Go and take a cold shower."

"I agree with Cally absolutely," Jenna said. "It's love that matters, not sex. Of course, you can't expect men to see it that way." 

Blake decided that that meant she was annoyed with him. Which was understandable.

"Ah, but I do see it that way," Vila demurred quickly. "But then I'm an exceptionally sensitive and caring type. Avon's very quiet. Wake up, Avon. Avon? Well, Blake, then. What do you think?"

"I don't think at all," Blake said, closing his eyes. "Don't you ever listen to Avon?"

"Sex is a purchasable commodity," Avon said to Vila, his only contribution to the conversation. "If what you want is sex, you would find it available on any planet we pass, at a price within even your means."

"I don't want to pay for it," Vila said, affronted. "I'm a thief, I don't pay for anything, unless I have to. It's not in my nature. And besides, the women are right - you have to be emotionally involved with the other person. I do, anyway. I'm sure someone like Avon prefers it with total strangers, but not me, and at this point I think I should just say that I'm very fond of you, Cally. Not to mention you, Jenna." He smiled at them hopefully, with just a touch of anxiety and pathos: very hard to resist.

"Goodness, I'm glad he didn't mention me," quick Jenna said, mock sotto voce, fanning herself.

"And we're all very fond of you, Vila," Blake said and gave him a wide, beaming smile and a quick wink.

Vila looked gratifyingly alarmed. "Thank you, Blake. But I know you're a very busy man, wouldn't dream of troubling you. No, what I had in mind-"

Blake subsided beneath Vila's rising voice, laughing quietly to himself. He glanced once or twice from beneath his lashes in Avon's direction. Once Avon was looking his way, once not. He felt innerly hungry, like a wolf. Hunger for Avon never left him. He had learned to live with the savage ache. Cunning Avon, who never let Blake sate himself, so that his desire, though it seemed to wax and wane like the phases of the moon, was constantly present. Tonight it seemed to have reached a zenith. He wanted to fight the world for Avon and win his favours, here before them all. He wanted Avon to know him as a hero and kneel at his feet, while he knighted Avon with the point of his sword. Terrible, beautiful fantasies of glorious deeds, valour and the conquest of love. 

Out of the question. 

And yet, and yet. 

The next time Avon glanced his way, Blake caught his eye and smiled at him. At the same time he heard Vila saying, with a little slur in his voice, "And what do you think about sex, Avon me old mate?" He peered at him doubtfully. "You do know what I'm talking about, do you?"

"I should think talking about it is as far as you get," Avon said with a lazy little smile and Blake laughed out loud. 

Thankfully, Vila subsided after that or, if he did not, Blake didn't know about it. He was concentrating on Avon, who had a quintessential beauty at the moment. His hair, with the gloss of good health about it, had grown longer and was threatening to curl. Even in repose, he had the arrogance of grace and good looks. Blake tried not to look at him too often but found his gaze straying there constantly. 

Once or twice, on retreat from Avon, his eye met Jenna's but tonight, he had forgotten who she was. 

Because he had grown up a rebel, feisty with ambition and hungry for change in a world which stamped on change and its dreamers along with it, Blake had learned the habit of keeping things to himself. But tonight, he felt an absurd longing to share - not just the little things but the whole of himself: to share with Avon the secrets he carried around with him constantly, the worries, the plans, even the dreams: to expose them all nakedly for Avon's cool insight and have Avon work alongside him to the same end. The conversation drifted over his head and he felt the wine feathering his thoughts, diffusing them into fantasy, which became a sexual fantasy... 

He wouldn't have to move, once the others left. Avon would come over to him as he lay there and divine his drowsy desire and go down on him sweetly, fierce with love, yet gentle, his lips warm... 

Or maybe he was too tired for the frantic energy of sex: maybe all he wanted was for Avon to be close to him. To lie with him, perhaps, touching him, quiet, ready to listen if Blake had things to tell him-

"...I think your Noble Leader is asleep." 

Avon's cool, cynical voice cut through his gentle dreams and jolted him harshly. His eyes flew open. 

"Not really," he said indistinctly. 

Everyone was looking at him, Avon with that cold, bright contempt Blake despised. Fantasy was a cruel thing, because the truth was, he had utterly failed with Avon. After everything that had passed between them, they were not even so much as friends. He could share nothing with Avon, because Avon held every dream of his in rank contempt, preferring to deal, instead, with practicalities. The far-seeing visionary in Blake met up against the stone wall of Avon's step-by-step approach to survival every time, Avon's narrow world filtered by self-interest, while Blake's tortured imagination flew free and far, saving nations and worlds from the yoke of oppression. They were totally, finally, incompatible in every single way which mattered. 

Love was out of the question, from a man who did not even like him.

"Why don't you turn in, Roj?" Jenna was saying to him, her eyes and voice gentle. She was always receptive to his moods, understanding. For a moment, now, he remembered why it was that he needed Jenna in his life.

He shook his head without looking at her. "Soon." He looked across at Avon, against his own will. He knew too well just how that glance would seem. 

And so it proved. Gradually the others drifted away but Avon remained. 

Blake let out a long, slow breath.

Avon's voice was waspish. "If you wanted to be alone with me, Blake, there are easier ways than by making everyone else embarrassed to stay."

"Obvious, was it?" Blake swung his legs down from the chair and went to sit on the couch vacated by Jenna and Cally.

"Yes, I think it probably was."

"Do you care?"

Avon got up. He strolled around the room, hands clasped behind his back. "Do you know who your friends are, Blake? Do you know, for example, that I tried to convince the others to leave you behind, when you were sulking downplanet after Gan's death?" 

Confession or challenge, Blake let it fall untouched. "I expected you to try. Obviously, you didn't succeed."

Avon lifted his head, in clear wonder at the human race. "One sane voice amid the hysterical babbling of your deserted followers. It didn't seem the right time to advance my suit. I'm afraid that, in the light of inspired histrionics, pragmatism comes a poor second to the eyes of the common man."

Blake lifted his chin, tilted his head back to watch Avon circling. "If I let you lead..." 

Avon stopped, his attention caught. "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"

"...what would you do?" 

Avon considered this. The overhead lights cast a halo around his dark head, as he listened to Blake's next question. 

"Would it be so very different from what I'm doing?"

"Oh yes," Avon said immediately. "There is enough space out there to put a great distance between me and the Federation. There are countless opportunities in the galaxy for a man with ambition."

"And talent," Blake said, "which modesty forbade you to mention. Yes, I see that, Avon. But what's stopping you? We could take you any time, to the place of your choice. You only have to say the word."

Avon stared at him. "It isn't that easy. Unfortunately, with things as they now stand," he gave Blake a nasty smile, "that would mean waiving any claim I might have to the Liberator."

"Oh, I see!" Blake exclaimed. "You want Liberator as well."

Avon smiled at him again. "If possible." He invested both the words and the smile with a wealth of meaning. "If not... let's just say I'm waiting for the right opportunity."

Avon, with his quick mind and his genius for technology, was in fact a man of considerable power. Blake never underestimated that, nor forgot it. On the contrary, it was part of Avon's appeal for him - a mind to match his own, a resource and a strength which complemented his own strengths. Power was a sexual force, there was no doubt about that, and Blake saw it in Avon and thrilled to it - and yet it made him wary. Still, in a matter of wills, his was the stronger, as he had proved over and over again, forcing Avon to give ground.

He sighed. "All right. You've made your point. Stop kicking, Avon, we're not on the flight deck now. Come and sit down."

"Yes, I want to talk to you, Blake," Avon said, hitching up his trouser legs neatly as he sat next to Blake. "How many more secrets have you got up your sleeve? A year setting up the meeting with Kasabi, tracking rebel movements, hunting for Central Control. What else is there to come?"

He studied Avon's profile - the straight, aristocratic nose, the lengthy lashes shadowing his thin cheeks, the severe, pale lips - and answered a doubt Avon had not voiced. "I trust you, Avon."

Avon's expression didn't change, the gaze of his brown eyes steady as he returned Blake's stare. "Trust is not what I hear, when you reveal a year's secret manoeuvres in one very public conversation."

So that had hurt, had it? Avon thought he deserved Blake's especial confidence. His heart beating fast and light, Blake perceived the brink of change in their relationship. He said, very quickly, "Back me, Avon, and I won't keep anything from you. Promise to stay, see this thing out with me, until we succeed or die trying." 

Almost imperceptibly, his hand had stretched along the back of the couch, until it touched Avon. Almost imperceptibly, Avon's head moved closer to his own.

"You want a great deal in return for your trust, don't you?" Avon murmured, his breath falling lightly and quickly onto Blake's face. 

At that moment Blake was feeling a vast exhilaration glowing in the pit of his belly, an unparallelled excitement. Together, they could take on the world and conquer it. Together... His hand squeezed shut on Avon's shoulder and pulled him close, closer. Leather creaked as Avon shifted within his arm.

"I'd almost like to agree," Avon said, a warm whisper against his skin. "But I don't think our ambitions are in any way compatible."

"Well, I don't know about that. Opportunistic you may be; corrupt you're not. I'd trust you in a position of power, Avon, about as much as I'd trust any man."

There was Blake, offering him a nation. He didn't have it yet to give but that was a small point, immaterial. One day, the world would be his to dole out. They felt the excitement of the moment, the heady rush of grandiose ambition, as possibilities stretched out ahead of them, on an endless shining path. A breath apart; kissing Avon now seemed the most natural thing to do in all the world. 

He leaned towards him and Avon shut his eyes- 

The door flew open behind them and Blake shot away from Avon, his heart pounding sickly in his chest.

"Blake - oh." Jenna stopped short, and took in the scene. "I-"

Blake threw out an arm in a welcome he didn't feel, his veins thumping with shock. "Come on in. We're only talking," and he could have bitten out his own tongue.

"Brilliant!" Avon applauded quietly, a cynical gleam in his eye. His gaze flickered mockingly from Blake to Jenna, both of them flustered, while he himself seemed icy. Blake ran a hand through his hair and rallied to make the best of it.

"Is Vila on watch?" He smiled at her, trying to be kind. She had a high pink spot of colour in each cheek.

Avon rose to his feet. Kindness was not his forté. "I was just about to leave."

"Were you?" Blake said and Avon's glance flew his way like a dagger. 

"If I wasn't, I should have been."

Blake saw his immortal night with Avon, all the dark seductive promise of pleasure and pain and a step towards a future, scatter like so much dust in a wind. 

Jenna was turning on Avon a look of scorn. "You don't need to run away. I only came to tell Blake that I'll take a watch with Cally. Vila's drunk."

"You could have told him that on the intercom," Avon said. "There must be more. Don't let me stand in your way." Again he moved for the door and Blake bounded to his feet and stopped him. 

"Don't."

"No, don't," Jenna said. "Believe me, I had no intention of - interrupting - you."

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Blake could see that Jenna had had a severe shock, which was only now turning into anger. If he let her go now and brood on it, the matter would be irreparable. 

And yet, if he let Avon go... 

He held out one hand to her and grasped Avon's shoulder with the other. All hell loosed itself, a pot-boiling nest of worms... 

"What have you got in mind," Jenna fairly spat at him, "some obscene threesome?"

"No. Jenna-"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Blake?" She said it with utter venom. 

Visions flew into his mind. Good job she didn't know the half of it. And - yes, he would like it. Would love it. His dark Avon and his golden Jenna. Pity it was out of the question. They would tear each other's eyes out, even in the act of love.

Jenna jerked her head towards Avon. "I thought he was leaving."

"You thought right." Avon had twisted out from under Blake's fingers and was making for the door, above all this.

"I meant permanently," she said with sweet poison.

Avon's feet stopped. "That too," he promised.

As the crisp sound of Avon's steps faded away, Blake suddenly had no doubt where his own anger lay. He caught Jenna in steely fingers and frowned down into her face. 

"The last thing we want is for Avon to leave us. Push him like that and he might just be perverse enough to go."

She was furious and sickened. "Perverse isn't the half of it. I'd say good riddance."

"We need Avon, Jenna, and don't you ever forget it."

"Right. Then you'd better get after him, hadn't you, and do whatever it is you do to bring him round?"

He heard her voice, tart with a woman's bitchery, but then by chance he saw her eyes. 

"Jenna."

"Let go of me. Blake, let go." 

Pride, jealousy, bitter pain made her push ineffectually against his chest. He held on to her until she relaxed against him. She was tasting unexpected victory and masked it in weary resignation. 

"You can't have both of us, Blake."

This seemed so untrue that it had the scent of self-delusion, if nothing else. He didn't argue, bit his tongue down on it and just held her. 

"You know I love you." Words he had never been able to speak to Avon; nor ever wanted to, save once.

Later, when she lay asleep in his arms, her hair a golden star-bright spread on his pillow, he rose and dressed, without waking her, and went to look for Avon, finding him alone on the flight deck .

"Where are the others?"

Avon looked at him with a kind of cold surprise. "Cally has gone to bed with a migraine. Vila is sleeping off his party mood. I decided that relying on Jenna's offer of replacing him would be to take a little too much on trust - given the circumstances."

Yes, he'd walked right into that one. The viewscreen was clear with a panorama of silvery stars, laced together by darkness. Blake did not attempt explanation, sure that Avon was just waiting, snappily prepared with poison darts.

"Well, we're all very grateful to you, Avon. And now I think it's time you gave that overactive sense of responsibility a rest, don't you? Get off to bed." He lifted himself into his chair and sank his chin into his hand. "Anything to report?"

"Yes, in fact." Avon walked over to the table where Orac reposed and inserted the key. "Orac," he addressed it, head tilted. "Give me a status report on the situation on the planet Chrysos."

Orac's reply was freezing in tone, a true tribute to Avon's nightly tinkering with the vocal circuits. "It is barely fifteen minutes since I gave you a report on that matter, during which time the situation has changed very little indeed." 

Avon looked only mildly disconcerted and his voice was as smooth as silk, persuasive. "And now I want you to give it to Blake."

For some reason - Avon's tone, perhaps, the way he was looking at Orac, his mastery of the complex machine - whatever, Blake experienced a warm rush of love for Avon at that moment, a feeling so real and so physical it tightened his throat with hurt and made his stomach dive. He gazed on Avon, unseen, and tried to listen.

Orac almost sighed. "If you insist. The plague situation is escalating, with five thousand, nine hundred and forty-two reported dead, rising every hour in a Poisson curve. At this rate, in twenty hours the number of cases diagnosed will be two hundred thousand and seventeen."

"Have you heard enough?" Avon asked of Blake, hand poised over Orac's key.

"Have you made any progress with a possible antidote?" Blake addressed Orac.

"There is extensive documentation within Federation files. Given the right components, a suitable drug could be manufactured here on the Liberator. The process is not difficult."

Blake sighed to himself. They would have to go. Every sign was pointing them that way. 

"It has a sort of twisted justice about it," Avon said, watching him, reading his mind without difficulty. "The last person they will be expecting help from is you."

"Will you see to the development of the drug?"

"In my spare time?" Avon countered sarcastically. "Research chemistry is really not my field."

Blake favoured him with a stark glance. "Why, Avon, I've always admired your versatility." 

Avon matched him stare for stare. With one last blaze of contempt he turned his back and left with the parting shot, "Really? I'd say that versatility was your forté."

 

 

The warm sunlight flitering down onto the surface of the planet Avra Alpha was a physical treat and also a visual one. Blake, who had been sunk in a black pit of depression ever since the events of two days ago, felt his spirits lift a little. 

The grass was green and the sky was blue, the sunshine a warm caress on his face. It reminded him of a bright meadow from a nursery rhyme, peopled with white woolly sheep and a shepherd leaning on a stile, watching cottonwool clouds pass across an arc of blue. Little white daisies grew here and there and the odd butterfly danced past on the breeze; a picturebook scene and a day to be cherished. 

This was a neutral planet, well out of the way of Federation military routes. Blake could not imagine any danger here, on a simple herb-gathering mission, and so they had all come down to the planet's surface - himself, Jenna, Vila, Cally and Avon.

"The herb febria," Orac had explained, "grows in profusion in the temperate zone of Avra Alpha and at least a hundred kilos will be required to prepare an antidote with which to treat the entire population of Chrysos."

"That's a lot of flower-picking," Vila howled, as Blake handed out the sacks.

"Vila," Cally reproved. "You should be glad of such a pleasant task."

"If you prefer," Avon added, materialising at his shoulder and making him wince, "someone, very soon, is going to have to flush out the coolant channels beneath the drive unit, because there is a blockage there impairing efficiency by 0.2% - insufficient to engage the interest of the auto-repair system but it will have to be dealt with, none the less. Are you-?"

"All right, all right, you've made your point," Vila grumbled. "Picking flowers it is."

Blake chuckled quietly to himself and slung the sack over his shoulder. As he stood rolling his shirtsleeves above the elbow, taking off his leather jerkin and slinging it around his shoulders, he allowed himself a moment to admire the pretty scene, while a kind of wistfulness encroached. Pink-edged clouds drifted slowly across a bright blue sky, giving the day a sense of timelessness, a still peace and beauty. He breathed in the good clean air, smelt the warm grass and felt, for once, almost happy.

The white flowers were prolific, big bright clumps of them everywhere. The movements soon became routine: pick, pick again, throw the handful into the sack, move forward on hands and knees. Conversation died out as they became hotter and more tired; also, they were drifting apart over a wider and wider circle. Blake sat back on his heels and wiped his sweating brow with a grimy hand. He was nearest to Avon and could see the nape of his neck, bowed as he knelt to the task, dark hair curling over the collar of his grey leather top. 

As Blake paused for a breather, he watched Avon, also pausing in his task, his head lifting, looking out towards the dark green clump of trees to the west. Birds flew and danced in the air, singing. Avon was taking off his jacket now, revealing a thin white shirt which clung to him damply here and there. Then he rose to his feet. Blake quickly bent his head to his task, picking the small white flowers assiduously. He looked up to find Avon by his side, selecting another sack from the pile of empty ones. Avon's hair was plastered damply to his forehead with sweat. 

"Hot, isn't it?" Blake said unoriginally.

Avon was scanning the landscape with a hand shading his eyes. "I don't see any reason why febria shouldn't grow in the shade. I'm going to try over there." He gestured towards the trees. 

"I'll come with you." 

Blake scrambled gratefully to his feet, his limbs uncramping with various twinges. Avon was already walking off as Blake grabbed his bag and a handful of sacks and followed him. He thought he heard Jenna call but he didn't turn. 

Blake caught Avon up after several paces and they walked in silence, side by side. It was further than it looked but the walk over soft, lush grass was pleasant, the slight breeze cooling his hot face and neck. As they stepped into the cool shade of the trees, he sighed in relief. A thick white carpet of febria lay all around. Avon had a small smile on his lips.

Blake clapped him on the shoulder. "Brilliant. You weren't born Alpha for nothing." He dropped his bag and the sacks. A long way off, he could see the tiny specks that were Vila, Cally and Jenna, still toiling in the harsh sun. "Should we call them?"

"Can't they work it out for themselves?" Avon retorted. "I hardly think the idea is beyond the grasp of even a Delta brain."

Blake grinned and secretly agreed. In any case, he preferred it here alone with Avon. Silent, Avon was the most restful companion of them all. Blake felt no pressure on him to make polite conversation and knew that Avon would not. The cooler air fell on his skin like a caress. The grass here was a soft, viridian carpet, a mossy jewel under the golden eye of the sun, which winked indulgently through the waving leaves. They were in an avenue of trees so well-ordered that they could have been planted in a queen's garden. Birdsong and the rustling of leaves was the only sound.

Blake picked automatically and crept on, keeping rough pace with Avon. The spectre of Star One hung over him. Finding its location might be beyond their powers but he doubted it. They had persistence and the sort of doomed luck which made such things inevitable. Their wishes were always granted but with a dark twist, so that they wished the wishes unmade, and so it would be with Star One. He was sure of it but what else could he do? 

He gnawed his lip and fretted. He wished he could lay the burden at Avon's feet - 'Here, choose' - and share the dreadful doubts which kept him awake at nights and woke him, after too short a time, with a racing heart and a leaden sense of dread. But he shrank from it, because to admit to doubt was to admit there was a possibility that he was wrong, and Blake didn't dare to be wrong. For, if he was wrong... 

It was unthinkable. To destroy the lives of millions of people, as the destruction of Star One would do, you had to be very sure indeed that the price was worth it. Either that or very corrupt. Or insane.

"I thought you might be insane," Avon had said once, back on the London, long before Star One loomed large on Blake's horizon. 

Blake had leapt out at Avon then, snarling in a low and dangerous tone, "That's possible," but in fact the fear of insanity tortured him. 

He sat back on his haunches and reached for his bag. Finding a tall steel flask inside, he unscrewed the cap, took a long, thirsty swallow of the cold liquid and extended it to his companion.

"Drink?" he said gruffly.

Avon took it and drank and Blake watched Avon's tipped-back head, the movements of his throat as he swallowed. His eyes dark, fathomless and calm, Avon passed the flask back and Blake stashed it in the bag. When they resumed picking, he tried to blank his mind by a conscious effort, to think of something entirely different - for example, the simple comfort of sex, the gentle slope of Avon's thighs as he moved, the line of his buttocks, the strong lean muscles of his arm. It was peaceful here, just the two of them. He felt his anxiety recede, edged into the background by the sense of more pleasant things.

Then Avon said a curious thing, head bent over, watching the movements of his own hands among the white flowers. 

"Are you happy, Blake?"

"I don't know," Blake said, taken by surprise, adding after a profound silence, "For a while, back there, I thought I was... That's a funny thing to ask."

Avon made a quiet sound of exasperation. "You're as tense as I've ever seen you. Aren't you sleeping again?"

His heart tightened, that Avon cared enough to notice. He knew from the way that Avon was continuing to pick, precise and too careful, that he did not find such things easy to say.

"Not very well. I should get Cally to prescribe something. And you?" he said gently, not wanting this topic to slip away, to be wasted. "Are you happy?"

Avon made a harsh sound, which might have been a laugh or even the word itself, spat with derision - "Happy!" - and there was silence for a while, broken only when Blake deftly tied and sealed the top of a sack. They had filled three. He paused and lifted his face to squint upwards at the sun, thinking as he spoke slowly. 

"Day after day, on the Liberator; looking out and seeing nothing but night..."

Fanciful. He shook his head vigorously, surprised at himself. But Avon answered him quite normally. "The absence of daylight is, of course, an accepted cause of spacefarer's depression."

"One of them," Blake said. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded bleak, self-pitying almost, although he hadn't meant it that way. 

Avon glanced at him and said, not unkindly, "You have a purpose in life, Blake, a very real and determined goal. All right, your lifestyle is stressful but I always see conviction as your greatest strength."

But that was the most frightening thing of all. His conviction had turned out, after all, to be as ephemeral and transparent as gauze and as likely to blow away, just as soon as his goals had fallen within his grasp. 

He stared at Avon in consternation, a black void opening up in his mind. Avon returned his stare, sensing his despair, if not the reason for it. Blake sat back on his heels and laughed savagely. It was amusing, it really was, that the first thing Avon had ever said to comfort him had proved, instead, an annihilation. 

His hand clenched convulsively on the plastic sack. His knuckles whitened with the strain. Avon threw aside a handful of flowers and tugged Blake's sack away from unresisting fingers. 

His eyes bored blackly into Blake's. "Stop and rest."

Slowly, the warmth of Avon's hand penetrated the fog of despair and the panic began to recede. After a while they moved out of the shade into the warmth of the sun. Blake lay down flat and closed his eyes. Avon sat against a tree trunk nearby. The sun was soothing, bathing his system with comfort and languor. When he opened his eyes, black specks danced against an orange background. 

"Sunstroke, we'll get sunstroke," he said. Then he stiffened and half sat up, one hand going out to alert Avon. "Vila's coming."

Sure enough, one of the black specks was looming larger, with little stick arms and legs waving. Without a word, they scrambled their stuff together and went into the trees, where Avon stopped, head on one side. He pointed forward. 

"If we walk this way, we should reach a hillock."

Blake did not ask himself why it was so important to evade the others. He simply knew he had no desire, not yet, to go back into their company. If they wanted him for anything important, after all, they only had to press a button to consult him. Most likely they too had grown tired of picking in the sun and were seeking shade. 

They climbed the small hill, from where they could see the approaching figures, who entered the clump of trees and did not come out again.

"Well, we left plenty for them," Blake commented. Contented, he found a new spot to sit, one knee drawn up. He pulled a stalk of grass to nibble and looked out at the pastoral landscape stretching out tranquilly before his eyes. Avon sat nearby, distant, almost brooding. 

"No febria up here," Blake said.

Avon sounded disinclined to care. "Let your followers do it. Pleasing you is the major fulfilment of their lives. Why deprive them?"

"But it's not yours, is it, Avon?" 

He turned his head to look at his companion. His heart was thudding, his stomach fluttery with nerves. It was very quiet up here, the air sweet and clear. Avon's eyes were slitted a little against the sun and his voice was low and quiet.

"I never know what you want."

Blake's heart jolted and skittered now, his stomach turning over in shock and nervous thrills. He stared at Avon in silence. Avon was all darkness and light, dark hair, white skin, dark eyes. Snow White, perhaps, awaiting a lover's kiss. Along the line of his open shirt, a pinky gleam showed.

"You're burning," Blake said quietly and reached out in a dream. 

He touched Avon there, rubbed the line with his thumb and slid his hand, open-palmed, inside, over moist skin, the sharp, delicate ridge of Avon's collarbone. Avon watched him calmly, the breeze ruffling his hair, his face a sculpted plane of stillness, an ivory mask inhabited by some daemon, or god perhaps, with eyes that shone darkly with life.

In that moment, a contract was made, the future path a clear and shining ribbon in front of them. Blake did not even think, "if only," because, for once, what he had was all that he needed: and more than he had ever wanted or could imagine.

Avon undressed quickly and silently and lay down on the soft, mossy grass. The sun shone hotly through the leaves, dappling his skin with passing shadows. Naked, Blake joined him, in an arbour of natural beauty and the peace and the birdsong, the gentle caresses of sun and breeze on bare skin. Time seemed to pass slowly, as if they were dreaming one another's dream. They became, for a while, without thought, just two men making gentle love in the sunlight, a banquet of the senses richly spread before them. 

Avon's skin was wet and tasted sweet here, salt there. Feathering out across his chest and down his belly was a scatter of dark, sweat-damp hair turning fluffy in the air. Blake ruffled it with fingertips and traced it downwards, dipping his tongue into the shallow bud of Avon's navel, tracing the thin line down to where it grew in earnest, thick and dark and springy, the pale, blue-veined cock lying fatly there, rosy-tipped. Blake cradled it with one hand, then lay down and turned Avon's face towards him and drew him into a long, moist kiss, their bodies pressing together with a passionate sweetness. 

The fresh air, caressing naked skin, was irresistably sensual and the taste of Avon's mouth like some impossibly sexy wet dream. In another moment he would come and wake alone, with a pounding heart and his own cream on his skin. Avon's hands skimmed his body and stirred him indefinably. Blake was trembling with need, one hand shaking as it rose determinedly, to touch Avon's chin and tip his mouth towards Blake's again. 

Avon watched the trembling with wonder. A fine rash of goosebumps broke out on his skin, as Blake kissed him with a tender greed. Then, when Blake knelt between his legs and touched his mouth to the milky, sensitive skin of his inner thigh, Avon cleared his throat and said something in a harsh whisper - Blake's name, perhaps - as his head dropped back onto the grass. 

Drunk on the wines of sunlight and passion, a cool current of air lightly passing across his sensitised skin, Blake paused there and dropped his head quickly to kiss Avon's cock, as if that would relieve the aching, throbbing surge in his own loins. He barely brushed it with his lips before Avon twisted impatiently away and reached for his pile of clothes. Blake nuzzled his head against Avon's flank and waited, inhaling the scents of sunbaked earth, crushed grass and Avon: a heady mixture. Avon rummaged through a pocket and extracted a tube, which he tossed to Blake as he lay down once more. Blake caught it instinctively and looked at it.

"Sunscreen," Avon answered the unspoken question. 

Blake grinned at him, breathless and dizzy with lust and love. "Are you burning somewhere?"

Avon closed his eyes. "What do you think?"

Blake squirted the stuff over his trembling fingers - it had a tangy, spicy smell - and applied it to an area of Avon's body which never saw the sun, a secret, hidden place, and Avon sighed and pressed himself down against his silky, intrusive fingers. Then Blake splashed a lot of cream over himself, wanting this to be easy, natural, like the easy play of the elements on his body. And it was easy, Avon sliding onto the hard arrow of his cock with only the briefest sound of pain or pleasure or both, and at that moment he wanted nothing more than to make Avon cry out with the force of it. But after several savage thrusts that he could not control, gradually he found his rhythm, found Avon's, fucked them both all the way to the urgent, honeyed glory of the end and, as he looked down into Avon's eyes at the very moment of it, he knew beyond a doubt that he loved Avon, that Avon loved him, that it was as simple and timeless a thing as that.

 

Afterwards it did not seem so simple. 

Blake rolled onto his side, heart hammering, taking Avon with him in his arms. His cock, still half hard, slipped away from Avon's body and he winced at the unpleasant separation, holding Avon tighter in compensation. Avon sighed once or twice, then settled, breathing quietly against his chest, sleeping probably, the slow steady pulse of his heart against Blake's ribs. 

After a while Blake found his teleport bracelet under his outstretched fingers and picked it up, raised it to his lips and thumbed the button. Against him, Avon startled. Blake gentled him again with a steady, stroking hand. 

It was Cally who answered. "Blake? Are you all right? We were wondering where you were."

"Fine," he heard himself say, his voice crisp and utterly normal. "We're fine. Avon and I have just wandered off the track a little. We'll teleport from here when we're ready."

How his voice could sound so normal, when he felt there had been a momentous change inside himself, he just didn't know. Cally, Vila and Jenna, the Liberator and his fight for mankind among the stars - all these things seemed like puppets on a stage and this the only real thing in his life, this man lying here in his arms, the dark head next to his, the sunshine on their naked skin. 

When Avon unpeeled himself with a sigh and lay beside him, Blake reached for and took his hand, holding it tight in his own. And so they lay side by side, hand in hand. Blake stared up at the sky through leaves, a blue-and-brown pattern shifting with the breezes, three and a half sacks of forgotten flowers at his elbow. He felt drowsy, too lazy to move. 

Inside his heart, despair warred with a happiness more profound than he could ever remember feeling. He was waiting for Avon to spoil everything, as he would. Avon would not let pass by such a temptation as this - Blake vulnerable, unarmed and hoping for a tender word. Avon, dipped in the Styx, had surely drowned there. No Achilles heel to mar the perfect black night around his soul.

Not true. 

No, if anything, Avon felt things more deeply than most, which was why, no doubt, he rejected emotion, friendship, love, so resolutely.

"Did you love Anna, Avon?"

"You know I did."

"Did she love you?"

Avon moved by his side, the stirrings of disquiet. "Prurience doesn't suit you, Blake."

"Don't you think it's natural, for me to want to know?" Blake pointed out.

An insect landed on Avon's forehead. Liking the sweat it found there, it balanced a delicate feeler to drink. Blake brushed it off, breaking all of its fragile limbs, swept it dying into the air.

"All I hear in your question is 'what was she like in bed?' " Avon's voice was thin with the nasty irony he deployed so easily. He stared into Blake's face with dislike. 

Blake hoisted himself up on one elbow and stared back, unafraid. "Anyone would be brilliant in bed with you." He stroked Avon's arm down to his elbow and back again, slow and gentle. "But I wasn't asking that, Avon. Don't twist things." 

"I don't believe you. You haven't any memories of your own, so you want mine, is that it?" Avon sneered.

A spasm twisted Blake's face for a moment at the cruelty but he answered quietly enough. "I do have some memories, nothing very clear. A woman in the Freedom Party... I think I loved her..."

"Stop it, Blake. I don't want to hear," Avon hissed at him. 

Blake shrugged. He closed his eyes. It was useless trying to reach inside Avon. He was too tight, too well-guarded ever to let warmth in or out, except on the rarest and most tragic of occasions, which conditions Blake did not wish recreated.

His eyes came open in surprise, as Avon's low voice said into his ear, "So there was a woman in the Freedom Party - possibly. Now there is Jenna. And men?"

Blake smiled, despite himself. "Men! You sound as if they were legion." Legions and legions of men marching into Blake's bed and out again.

"Perhaps they were," Avon said. "Or am I supposed to believe your - expertise - is all the product of instinct?"

Blake had had a surfeit of Avon's smouldering black bitterness. His hands shot out and gripped him, bringing his mouth very near to Avon's. "Enough, Avon. I'm not going to bite, however much you spit at me. I don't remember any men, particularly," answering the question. "I suppose there must have been some. And you?" 

He hardly expected any answer but after a moment Avon sighed and echoed him. "I suppose there must have been some..."

Blake's brow flickered at the unwelcome thought: his Avon, in someone else's arms. And then he smiled to himself, leaned his forehead down to Avon's cool damp one, so that their lips were almost touching, sharing one breath. 

"Ah, Avon," he sighed, secure in a cocoon of their own warmth, the scent of their sex, "were you as difficult for Anna as you are for me?"

"There is really no point of comparison," Avon replied quellingly but he smiled as he said it, so that was all right.

Blake dozed a little, the gentle play of sun and breeze on his skin rocking him like a cradle, strange thoughts and dreams drifting through the floss of his drowsy brain. When Avon stirred violently in his arms, Blake awoke suddenly. He turned onto his back, gently, keeping Avon's head pillowed on his shoulder, and lay looking up through the leaves to the sky. Such peace here. The black and troubled universe seemed a long way away. You got no glimpse of it from here, no glimpse at all. 

And the universe was scarcely less trouble in all its scope and immensity than the man lying here in his arms, for, when they began to make love again, Avon's mood was not gentle but fierce and angry, setting a storm of excitement whirling in Blake's loins, even as his mind resisted it. Avon slid his mouth across Blake's cheek to the sensitive lobe of his ear, his voice raw with hatred, with passion. 

"I despise myself for wanting you." His eyes gleamed down, his smile threatened. "Do you know that, Blake?"

"Oh yes," Blake hissed back, breathless. "You make that sweetly clear, every single minute of the day." And he glared back into the stygian malevolence of Avon's eyes. 

Between them, Avon's cock pressed and yearned against his own. Swept along by the dark erotic fury of it, the rush of urgent angry sex, Blake's mind dragged reluctantly but his body led the way and gloried in it, urging Avon on to take him, violently, with Avon's careless kind of finesse which stayed with him, even to extremes. And Blake was so willing to surrender, so tender and yielding that it caused in Avon, surprisingly, anger: so that at the most intimate moment he raised himself, deep inside Blake, and demanded, "What's the matter with you, Blake? Do you like me hurting you?"

Avon's eyes were the darkest black they could be, surrounded only by the thinnest circlet of brown. "If it's the only way I can have you," Blake said and breathed and finished, "Yes."

"It's classic," Avon hissed down at him, strung out on anger, passion. "You hate yourself and so you make me punish you."

And yet that was himself Avon had delineated, word by word. Blake stared at him, tracing every feature with his eyes, memorising Avon. He had a thousand things to say to the man and did not dare one of them. He recognised a love in himself so profound he could not give voice to it. It would not help. Pity Avon, who put himself through torture every day, clothed himself in armour which kept out nothing at all which mattered, only kept in the torments battling inside. His love could not save Avon. All they had was this. 

But even here, even though Avon whispered to him, meaning it, "Fight me, Blake, or I'll really hurt you," there were moments of tenderness. The way that, when he turned his head away, seeking air, Avon's hand took his chin, curved around the line of his jaw, drawing him back again, so that Avon could kiss his mouth, an act which seemed almost more intimate than sex. The way Avon, at last, whispered Blake's name in a voice which sent shivers running all through him. They were together, in a way that they had never been before. So much so that Blake was startled when Avon pulled back from him. He opened his eyes to see Avon staring down at his face, his eyes clouded, unsure. 

Blake held on to him. It was all he could do. Something cathartic was happening to them - or maybe it was the beginnings of orgasm stirring, he could no longer tell - but he was tensed up for anything and it was all terrible, all of it, or wonderful, perhaps. Avon kissed him and Blake settled into the kiss. But then Avon lifted his head away and stared down at him again, cloudy-eyed, heavy lidded with a sensual haze.

"Blake," he said, softly, deeply.

"What is it?"

Avon whispered to him, lost and poignant, "I can't - Blake-"

"What is it? Tell me."

And then, heartrending, "-I can't bear it."

And understanding, pitying him, Blake held him very close. He gave him no answers, because there were none. He felt bruised inside with sadness and tenderness for Avon, Avon who found no joy in love, only a new set of devils to be fought. Attuned to Avon as never before, he felt the precise moment when it happened. His eyes opened wide and looked into Avon's like stars in the night, to see Avon drowning in his, and they became one person. All the love and heartache and sadness and ecstasy surged inside Blake and poured forth into Avon and the world turned inside out with the rushed beating of their hearts as they fused into one. When Blake held Avon to him, while the tremors racking them both subsided, he could only think one thing: that they could not survive this. That they would never be the same again.

 

The air had turned flat, the breeze cooler, the bright edge to the day dulled, as they picked up their clothes and finished dressing, in silence. Avon would not meet his eyes, though Blake tried to engage them, wanting to say - something. That it wasn't the end of the world. That they could make something of it, if they tried. 

But Avon looked past him or through him, as remote as Blake had ever seen him. Blake blanked from his mind everything but the most routine details - stand up, fasten clothes, sit down, pull on boots. A leaden sense of tiredness dragged his mind down into dullness. He wanted a bath and bed. Nothing more. 

Except- 

Not to let Avon go. Never to let him go.

He glanced at Avon as the other man, head down, held his shirt in one hand and dusted grass from it with the other. Blake raised his wrist, instructing Orac to get a fix on their position and bring them up. Avon came to stand beside him, looking up at the sky. Blake had the absurd desire to take Avon's hand, as once before. He had shied away from the risk of rejection at that point but now he thought that Avon might well have accepted such a move from Blake then, when it did not matter. There was no chance he would accept it now. He tried, anyway. Avon took his hand and threw it aside, hard, with a bitter sneer of contempt on his lips.

When they reached the Liberator, Avon simply walked away from him. Something, some misguided impulse made Blake follow, taking longer strides to catch him up. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, he didn't know what, and the words he heard himself say left him in a rush of tenderness, looking into Avon's clear dark eyes, remembering them hazy, that and the gentle touch of the man's hand on his body, the way Avon had fucked him, gentle, hard, right to the heart of him, and he wanted so much- 

To do something words were not equal to. 

"Avon... my name is Roj. Would you use it?"

Avon just looked at him. The dream shattered like glass. 

"Like Jenna does?" Avon said bitingly.

 

 

He hugged his sweet, painful secret to himself and threw himself into work with a verve which distracted his bleeding heart and his aching sense of loss every time Avon was not near him. And Avon, like a captured warrior defeated by Blake in battle, loitered palely and rarely spoke, except in anger. There was, Blake now knew, no way he could win. An unwanted passion, an obsession Avon could not deny and had not denied - it was easy for Blake to make Avon dance to his demands, fuck, kiss, cry, bleed, love... but Avon only hated him for it.

But Blake would feel, at routine times, an awareness, the brush of a moth's wing. Turning, he would catch Avon's eyes, fall into the slow dark burn of his gaze, watch Avon try to drag it away, yet continue to feast his eyes on the warmth of Blake's smile, the bright slow blink of his eyes as they both remembered. A complicit secret which was - almost - a happiness. At such times, Blake thought, to hell with it. It's all we've got. And, more surprisingly: it's -almost - all I want. 

They had sex whenever Blake felt like it and sometimes when Avon did. Once, after a particularly fiery confrontation, some vicious bitter argument on the flight deck, words flying like arrows, in the air beneath which the others ran about, darting this way and that and praying for it to end: when they, the outsiders, left, Blake turned down the lights and prowled after Avon, seizing him and pressing the simmering heat of himself into the wound-up spring of Avon's bitter welcome. Clinging together, clutching, they jerked off together without a word. 

His hunger for Avon seemed only to grow, as if it fed on satiation. His tongue insisted on tasting the remotest places of Avon's body, until he found them sweet. Blake knew nothing about what was going on in Avon's head, while his body avidly learned all there was to know about Avon's. Speaking was less easy than the language that touch spoke so eloquently for them, and far less beautiful. He felt, madly, that it no longer mattered; that in any case they had reached a place where they could stay, forever if need be.

He made one attempt to talk to Jenna but she brushed him aside and walked on past him. 

"Don't tell me, Blake. I'm not interested."

That was most likely untrue. Blake sensed in her a vituperative greed for detail. Not that he could, or would, tell her anything at all about that which mattered: about some of the things that he and Avon had done and would do again, things which in the light of day seemed unspeakable but which, in the decent silence of the night, Avon's breath mingling with his, his body moonwhite and milky beneath Blake's absorbed, entranced fingers, every most intimate, ultimate act seemed the most natural thing in the world. 

How could you give that up? Why should you want to? Even Avon did not try to pretend that, not any more.

 

 

The antidote was made to Orac's specification and here they were, en route for Chrysos. Blake was lying in his cabin, trying to sleep, when a tremendous judder rocked the ship, flinging him to the floor, cracking his head painfully on the wall. At the same time the klaxon of the alarm begain wailing insistently through the corridors to rouse sleepers and Avon's voice, much amplified, snapped out through the intercom, "Blake, battle stations. We're under attack."

He was off and running, grabbing a jerkin from somewhere and struggling into it as he pounded along the corridors, meeting Jenna running on the way. They arrived together on the flight deck . Seeing them, Vila cut the alarm and the awful mechanical klaxon howl ceased. 

The trouble was plain enough to see. Four pursuit ships in attack formation and one lone outsider, a ship he didn't recognise. As he watched, a Federation ship peeled off and wheeled in, on a direct attack run.

"What the hell are you doing, Avon?" he blazed, flinging himself to a command position. "That little lot didn't just materialise from nowhere!"

Avon was pale and tense, concentrating on readings, jabbing his forefinger on a calculator, as he worked on a strategy of defence. "I'm afraid that's exactly what they did. We already suspected the Federation had detector shields. This conforms it."

"What's that?" Blake asked roughly, indicating the unidentified ship. "Zen?"

"A cargo-class cruiser, origin Earth, emitting constant distress signals."

"Wouldn't you?" wailed Vila, equally distressed.

"Evasion course, Blake?" steady Jenna suggested, reaching to plot it in and carry it out.

"Yes - no, dammit. We can't leave that ship there."

Vila's "Why not?" clashed with Avon's urgent, "Hold on - plasma bolt about to make impact. Three, two, one-"

The ship rocked violently and everything slid about and clattered. "Zen! Damage report!" Blake yelled, trying, in the confusion, to make sense of incoming data, assimilate facts and make decisions, trying to draw the crew together to a working cohesion. In the mayhem Avon came around to stand in front of him, dark-eyed and serious, his voice low and clear across the noises. 

"Blake. If we move into this position, use that ship as a shield, then we can-" 

Sleek head bent alongside Blake's curls. Avon traced out various strategies which Blake examined, thinking, while Jenna and Vila and Cally lined up the neutron blasters and fired away the Liberator's power, spiralling out into the vacuum of space, and - "Dammnit!" Blake ground out between clenched teeth, watching one of the Federation ships veer sharply away and the silver flash of the Liberator's firepower dart out beyond it, missing. 

Avon whirled away from him and began to jab out orders to Jenna for a position change. Almost as quickly, Blake was after him, grabbing his shoulders and turning Avon to face him. 

"No, Jenna! If you do, that ship will have no chance at all..."

"You care?" Avon hissed, eyes afire. 

The draining energy banks argued his case for him. Suddenly this little event had attained the proportions of a major disaster and Avon's voice, the voice of the serpent, was lashing at him freezingly. 

"If it's us or them, Blake, you can't seriously be entertaining the idea of a noble suicide. Can you?" He grabbed at Blake but Blake simply pushed him off and walked over to the consoles.

"What will happen if we move away, as if we're running?" 

Jenna answered him, "No chance of that now, Blake. The shields and the blasters have depleted the reserves too much for anything more than standard by four."

"Yes, I know, but if we move - there for example-" 

Avon was onto it by now, a hound on a fox. "-they'll follow us. Jenna, turn through 90 degrees, ahead standard by two. "

"Blake?" she requested confirmation and, "Do it," he snapped, for he and Avon had seen what the others had not. The Liberator turned and two ships followed it, as if to give chase. Avon was already working out a new angle at a tense and furious speed. Blake held onto his shoulder and relayed it to Jenna, point by point. 

"Plasma bolts launched and running," Vila yelled.

"Radiation flare shields?" Cally tautly queried.

"No," said Blake, arms folded, and, "Fire now!" 

Suddenly the Liberator, fast and unexpectedly manoueverable for a cripple, turned on its hunters to slip through the deadly plasma bolt fire and fired itself, once, twice, each of which ran in a true, direct line towards two of the ships.

"And then there were two!" Vila chanted happily, as the white flare of explosion lit the screen. The resulting odds were so much more to his liking. Survival might just have been turned on its head by that little manouevre. But no time to waste: the final two ships were regrouping and closing.

"Damage report," Zen intoned. "Energy banks one and two are drained. Three and four are operating at one fifth capacity. Thirty per cent damage to nacelle number two."

"Marvellous," Avon said bleakly, arms crossing. "We can't run now. We'll have to see them off."

Blake wheeled around in front of the viewscreen, thinking. "How can we take them one by one? Think, Avon." 

But before the steely look he bore down on Avon had time to bear fruit, help came from an unexpected quarter. A flash of silver from the crippled stranger hit sweetly on the centre of the nearest pursuit ship and it was gone, in an astonishing maelstrom of mercury sparks.

"Thank you, friend," Blake said.

"Don't count on it," Avon snapped back immediately. "Maybe the next one's for us."

But there were no more little bursts of energy from the beleagured cargo ship. Blake set about directing every spare source of power to the attack systems.

"Let him go, Blake," Jenna suggested.

"And have him come back with a couple of friends, while we're sitting here recharging? No way. Bring her round. Cally, put up the force wall."

"Blake, it's going to run," Avon warned.

"Drop the force wall and fire!" Blake roared, changing tack at the last possible second; and it was all right, his gamble paid off, the last Federation ship was blasted into atoms to the sound of cheers from his crew. Debris spiralled all around them and out there, dead, hung the other little ship. Blake exhaled in relief, sinking down into the couch slowly. "Somebody - Vila - get us a drink. "

"Just what I was thinking myself," Vila approved, rubbing his hands.

"Coffee," Avon elaborated with a dark stare. "Cally, see if you can talk to that ship."

Cally opened a channel but only the sound of a standard distress message filled the flight deck . 

"Reply to it," Blake said. "Ask them what their problem is." 

He thrust his booted legs out in front of him and crossed them, one arm sliding along the back of the couch, exhaling, feeling the throb of his tension slowly subside. That had been close. Too close. 

Avon came around and glared at him, obviously thinking so too. "Yes, we might as well find out exactly whom you nearly sacrificed the Liberator and all our lives for."

"Well, it's someone the Federation doesn't like, anyway," Blake murmured amiably enough. 

If he half-closed his eyes, Avon's face took on a soft focus, the same soft focus it had had last night in the half-light of Blake's cabin. His whole body sang with remembering. At least sexual frustration was no longer one of his problems, nor Avon's, presumably. He smiled at Avon, eyes crinkling up, as if the view dazzled him. Avon, however, remained waspishly uncharmed. 

"Well, let's finish the job, Blake. Why not? Ask them if there's anything else we can do for them - cannibalising Liberator's main drive unit to fix theirs, perhaps," darkly sarcastic.

Which Blake cheerfully ignored. "You think it's their main drive unit that's the problem, do you?"

Avon stared at him. "Well, unless they're sitting there for the view, of course."

"Maybe they're observing the sabbath," Vila popped in. He offloaded a steaming set of mugs. Everyone gathered round the table and found seats. 

Picking up a mug, Cally took the first sip and wrinkled her nose. "This tastes-"

"That's mine," Vila interrupted speedily, relieving her of the mug and taking a defiant swig, right under Blake's quelling eye.

"Drinking on duty, Vila?"

"It's medicinal," Vila said. "For shock."

Blake's reply was cut off by a masculine voice, filling the flight deck through the com channels. "This is Axel Griffen of the free ship Saracen."

Blake's eyebrows rose, angled first at Avon, then at Jenna. Neither showed any recognition. Coffee in hand, Blake swung himself up and went around the consoles to speak. "Roj Blake, on the Liberator. What's the nature of your distress call, Griffen?"

"Are you able to give us assistance?"

"We can discuss it," Blake agreed cautiously and Avon grimaced quietly to himself.

Are the five of us enough, to play good Samaritan to all the lost causes in the galaxy as Blake would like to?

 

 

Jenna, Avon, Blake. This was Blake's chosen parley party, who boarded the Saracen to meet Axel Griffen and his crew of four. Blake and his crew had come ostentatiously armed. He noted that the Saracen's crew also each had a handgun strapped to their waists. 

The ship was small and the flight deck bore no resemblance to Liberator's roomy lounge-style luxury. They were taken instead to a rec room on another floor. The air in the ship was warm and smelt unpleasantly sweaty. 

Griffen himself was a short, bearded man with a piercing blue-eyed stare. "Grethe Yavitz, my computer expert," he said, introducing an icy blonde female, stunning to look at, yet completely cold. "Her sister Danai." A younger, gilt-blonde girl who smiled sweetly first at Blake, then Avon. "Dav, ship's doctor." A lanky individual with long hair and a sarcastic smile. 

Blake introduced himself, Jenna and Avon, noticing Grethe Yavitz's reaction out of the corner of his eye. She lifted her head at the mention of Avon's name and stared at him, a long, dwelling look. Recognition? If so, it wasn't mutual. Avon's expression was perfectly cool. He looked, if anything, a little impatient, bored. 'Another of our mighty leader's whims,' Avon's expression said.

"We must thank you for your help," Griffen said briskly, without any trace of obsequiousness. "Thought we'd had it, until you turned up. We're a sitting target at the moment, I'm afraid. Our main drive unit's a mess. I don't suppose you have any specialists aboard?"

"Not as such," Blake said. "But we'll take a look, may be able to come up with something. You're not Federation people, I take it?" he asked, seeking to establish some framework here.

"Obviously not, I'd have thought," Dav drawled. "With four pursuit ships trying to deliver the coup de grace."

Blake smiled. "You never know these days. Mutiny everywhere you look."

"We're traders," Griffen said. "And I don't mind admitting to you that we operate outside Federation law. I know your name, Blake, and what you've been trying to do." 

"Traders in what?" Avon's clear, cold voice addressed him for the first time.

"Free traders," Griffen said, smiling pleasantly.

"Pirates," Avon said to Blake, with a thin smile.

"I was in your line myself," Jenna said quickly, to cover up Avon's social gaffe.

Griffen's eyes left Avon and flicked to her, as he said, "Yes, I know your name. Stannis. We aren't really in your league, though. We even take routine carrier missions at times - for instance, we've just been delivering medical supplies to a nearby plague planet."

Dav sighed ostentatiously. "Pleasant though this social chitchat is," he cut in, "can you help us - or can't you? Not to put too fine a point on it, no-one knows if those ships passed back a line on our position. Could be more on the way."

"I don't know-" Blake started to say and was interrupted by young Danai, gazing up at him with a heartfelt, "Oh, please."

Blake smiled down at her, avuncular. "I wasn't meaning to prevaricate. Of course we'll help you, if we can. After all, we're all on the same side."

"I wouldn't count on it," Avon said coolly. 

Griffen looked surprised and then laughed, a little awkwardly, deciding to take Avon's comment as a joke. Jenna went with Dav and Danai to look at the flight consoles and assess any damage. Avon and Blake went with Griffen and Grethe Yavitz deep down into the bowels of the ship. 

It was a bleak metalwork structure, a far remove from the relative luxury of Liberator. These people were used to basic living. The main drive was housed in a dome of silver, man-height and room-sized, its entrance plastered with yellow radiation warnings.

"You'll need suits," Grethe said abruptly. She had a low, cool voice for a woman.

Avon turned his head to stare at her. "What is your power source?" 

"It's a fission drive," Griffen said, almost apologetically, and Blake let out a low whistle. Nuclear fission drives, being inherently prone to disastrous failure, were not found nowadays on any but the most outdated of spacecraft. He shot out a hand, grabbed Avon's arm to hold him back.

"Wait a minute. You're not going in there, unless it's safe."

Avon shook off Blake's hand. "Of course it isn't safe. This kind of drive is never safe." He was extracting from an inner recess of his black jacket a pocketsized rad counter, which he flipped open and read as he paced around the dome.

"An expert?" Griffen asked of Blake, who smiled.

"In many things. But I'm not sure he's going to admit to unstable nuclear fission drives being among them."

"This is Kerr Avon, is it not?" Grethe asked, ice-blue eyes trained exactingly on Blake, and he nodded, waiting to hear what she might say next. She directed the gaze towards Griffen and said, "Rather a piece of luck, coming across him. He was very highly placed in the Federation technical staff."

A look passed between them which made Blake reach unobtrusively for the handle of his blaster, just making sure it was there and resolving to look after Avon, here on this ship of strangers who seemed to like the sound of him a little too much.

Avon reappeared and said to Blake, "The readings are all within normal limits. Normal, that is" - he smiled thinly - "for the core of a nuclear reactor."

"Will you go in?" Blake asked him, just as Grethe said impassively, "I'll get the suits." 

Blake winced inwardly. Couldn't they see that Avon was tricky, needed a careful touch? But Avon just blinked and said he'd do without a suit and extracted a probe from his pocket, preparing to go in.

"Is that safe?" Blake asked, frowning.

"I'm not planning on an extended sightseeing tour," Avon snapped and with that, he used the probe to override the door control and slipped inside. An alarm sounded briefly and was quickly quelled from within.

"He seems to be a useful type to have around," Griffen said to Blake, smiling.

"He is," Blake said: but, instead of an image of Avon working efficiently and brilliantly over some console, there rose another - Avon, naked, sighing Blake's name over and over, which he had taken to doing at some extremity of need or pleasure. The vision hurt Blake inside with the tenderness it summoned forth. It took the opening of the outer door to rouse him from his visions. 

Dav the doctor entered, bearing an armful of white suits. He whistled when he heard that Avon was inside, without one. "Must be more stupid than he looks."

"He knows what he's doing," Grethe said sharply. "That man's work is the basis of everything I know."

Must keep a careful eye on Avon, Blake thought again. They're a little too keen on him.

The door opened and Avon emerged, resetting the lock with speedy fingers. 

"Well?" Griffen asked and Blake noticed the sudden clenching of his hands, the tension. It mattered to this man. Well, so it would, in a world without friends, where you carried all you owned on your backs. Griffen and his crew needed the Saracen, every bit as much as Blake and his crew needed the Liberator.

"I'll need more time to look into it," Avon replied, frowning. Blake could see his technical curiosity had been engaged.

"I think he means he doesn't know," Dav said with the faintest of sneers.

Avon ignored him totally, continuing in his precise, well-bred voice, "The fault is most likely a computer malfunction. The early warning system is registering a massive surplus of radiation and has shut the system down."

"What?" Griffen said, looking positively alarmed, and even the cocksure Dav went very still. 

Avon's eyes flicked briefly to them but he continued talking to Blake. "There is no build-up of radiation. Either the detectors are at fault or - perhaps more likely - the limits have been set unnecessarily low. Quite a neat way" - his teeth showed sharkishly - "to disable a ship."

"No-one's touched it," Griffen said, puzzled. "None of us can handle complex engineering tasks."

"Then the most likely thing is a faulty detector circuit. Difficult to trace, perhaps, but probably simple to fix." He walked over to stand beside Blake, spiriting the probe away again.

Griffen looked at him; looked at them both; spread his hands. 

"Will you help us?"

 

 

"Avon and I will stay," Blake said, frowning, thinking it through, "and you'd better make the delivery to Chrysos." Suddenly alive to Jenna's silence, he glanced across at her. "Is that all right with you?"

She chewed on her lower lip. "I'm not sure it's wise to split up." Too many what-ifs were clustering in Jenna Stannis' practical mind. "We just ran into a Federation ambush, not far from Chrysos, when it's no secret that we've offered the Chrysoans assistance. Who knows what other traps the Federation might have in store." 

"Well, there's no alternative," Blake said, brusquely enough. "If we want to help these people-"

She stared at him. "But do we want to help them? Why should we?"

"Because they're going to die, if we don't," Blake said with measured emphasis, favouring her the while with a disbelieving stare. 

He'd hardly expected this sort of thing from Jenna, of all people. It was Avon from whom he'd expected the third degree, the 'what' s in it for us' speech - and it was Avon to whom Jenna now turned, saying, "Avon? Do you favour staying on to help these people?"

Avon gave a small, pale smile to no-one in particular. "Not personally."

She gazed at him hard, hands clenching once at her sides. "But you will, anyway. I'm beginning to see..." She rounded on Blake, faced him with a hard glare. "Well, that didn't take long, did it, Blake? You tried everything else and he was still out there, kicking. Now he's in love with you and he'll lick your boots as smartly as the rest of us. I've got to hand it to you. Your strategy was spot-on."

Blake winced as he drew breath to answer, without knowing precisely what to say. He glanced at Avon, to see how he had registered Jenna's thrust. Avon had gone dramatically white but his eyes glittered darkly, as he snapped back at her, "Staying here seems to me a somewhat less unattractive idea than returning to Chrysos." 

Jenna was stopped, for a moment, in her tracks, remembering just why Avon might have unfavourable memories of Chrysos. She conceded the point. "Yes, I can understand that."

"Can you?" Avon returned ironically. "I doubt it." 

Jenna flushed, guilty of forgetting too soon, making too little of someone else's trauma. It was true, she had forgotten that on Chrysos had begun the worst, the blackest time of Avon's life. She turned to Blake, breathing hard. 

"All right. But do you have to stay, Blake? Three is undercrewing Liberator rather."

Blake hesitated, rubbing a crooked finger across his chin in thought. "No," he decided at last. "We don't know anything about these people. I'll stay here with Avon. You and the others are quite capable of a three-day trip to Chrysos. You're on a medical mission, protected by the Orion Convention. Even if Chrysos is negotiating with the Federation, you shouldn't run into anything you can't handle."

She had lost him. She knew it. She turned on her heel to look out at the blackness of space and the Liberator hanging there like a child's tawdry token from a bracelet of tiny stars.

"Chrysos isn't my favourite place, either," Blake added. "It might be politically less embarrassing if I don't arrive with you." A storm was threatening. He could tell it from the rigid way she held herself, the tight high cant of her head. "Avon, go back to the Liberator and get your stuff. Get whatever I might need too."

Alone with Jenna, he turned her gently to face him. This was long overdue. 

Her eyes were dry, blazing, her voice rock-steady. "You've made your choice," she said, hard. "Haven't you, Blake?"

There really wasn't any nice way to do this. Pitying her, he did not try to touch her. "I haven't any excuses. Only, perhaps, that he was first with me. Long before you."

"Yes, and he's still coming first with you. And he always will, won't he?" 

He reached out, to touch the bright ribbon of her hair; stopped himself, let his hand fall empty to his side. "He needs me more than you do."

She fairly sparkled with aggression. No drooping flower, his Jenna, but a snowdrop, bowed beneath the harshest winter storm, ready to spring up once more. 

"Oh, that's the oldest cliché in the book. He's got you falling for that one, has he? Just because he's got the eyes of a Brecht tragedy and a nice line in self-irony, you feel sorry for him." 

Sorry. She virtually spat the word.

"That's not quite what I said."

"Blake," she said, gentler. "Blake. I know his type. He'll bleed you dry and give nothing back."

"I know," Blake said: and yet, Avon was something he must have.

"All right. You're obsessed with each other, I can see that, and a pretty sight it is. I wonder how much Vila noticed, the other night? You couldn't keep your eyes off him, could you, Blake? And Cally? Does she guess that her precious Avon only has eyes for you? I can forgive all that," she said, obviously believing it, "but what I can't forgive is the way he's coming between you and what judgement you ever had. We need you on Liberator. Can't you tear yourself away from him for a few short days? He'll hardly age in that time."

A furrow creased Blake's brow, in disbelief at this misconception. "I'm not staying here because I can't bear to leave the man, Jenna," he said bitingly. "Give me credit for some maturity. However I feel about Avon - or you, for that matter - it doesn't affect the decisions I make. I can't let it."

The laugh she gave was bitterly derisive. "Is that what you believe? It's nonsense, Blake, and you know it."

"I didn't hear you complaining before," Blake said and could have torn his tongue out.

She faced him, square and true. "When it was my turn, you mean? When it was me you loved?" And now the tears were there, stark and bright in her eye. She lifted her head. They did not fall.

Blake turned away from her. Leave her that dignity intact. She would need it, in the coming days. "I do love you, Jenna; I'll always love you. But Avon-" He stopped, gazed out unseeingly. "I have the strangest feeling about Avon."

"Yes?" she jeered. 

Blake shrugged his shoulders, let his hands fly wide as he gave voice to it. "If there's such a thing as fate, then Avon's mine."

"That's just an excuse to have what you want," she told him.

But the words stayed with her all the way, to Chrysos and beyond. 

 

 

On their second night, when Avon had tracked down the malfunction and all but completed the repair which would get the Saracen's main drive unit back on line, a keg of high-pressure beer was produced, by way of celebration. Blake drank some of the fizzy, pale brown stuff and then some more. An out-of-practice drinker, he felt quickly euphoric, then relaxed, then mellow. Danai made eyes at him across the room; he pretended not to notice. Grethe's eyes feasted on Avon with a kind of cold hunger. Well, lady, you can't have him. 

Drowsy, Blake watched Avon exchange courtesies with Griffen and Grethe. An unexpectedly civil guest among these strangers was Avon, in stark contrast to the caustic treatment he favoured his shipmates with on the Liberator. Good breeding, thought Blake, will always out, and he choked on a hiccup of laughter. 

He left when Avon did, walked with him along corridors which seemed to tilt, towards the cabin assigned to Avon. The previous night, Blake had bedded down in the ship's lounge, letting Avon have the only spare bed on board. This cabin was very tiny and perfectly functional. 

"Can I come in?" Blake asked and shut the door, before Avon could answer.

"I've been watching the sublight communications," Avon commented, as he unzipped his jacket and took it off, shaking each sleeve precisely and automatically before hanging it on the wall. "There's no word of any trouble in the Chrysos sector."

That was good news and Blake knew it, yet it all seemed so far away, scarcely real. When he was alone with Avon, the world receded. It was always so. Reality for him seemed to be where Avon was, these days. Tasting this unexpected truth, he gazed at Avon, suddenly caught out by love: Avon, in his shirtsleeves, smelling faintly (unusually, enticingly) of sweat, hair shining beneath the cabin lights, beautiful dark eyes dwelling on him.

"Let me stay?" Blake asked him, even though he knew what Avon's reply would be. Avon was already drawing breath for a whiplash reply.

"Just how mad are you, Blake?" he snarled. "Liberator's a long way away. We've got to be very careful here. Grethe hates you. Dav hates both of us. Griffen's a pirate and probably not too fussy what he trades in. Any hint of something - between us - is hardly going to win us any credit in the popularity stakes, wouldn't you say?"

Just what he had expected and, in any case, Avon was quite right. Blake turned to leave, his euphoria quite drained away now, leaving him just - tired. Weary. Alone.

"Oh, wait then," Avon's voice said behind him, deeper, richer, and Blake turned blindly in the circle of Avon's arms and met the demanding mouth with demands of his own. Never letting him go, Avon backed them both against the door and locked it. 

Blake broke the kiss, dragged his mouth away from Avon's and said simply, "Believe it or not, I want to sleep with you, not screw you,"

Such a little incident and yet he was never to forget it. If he had wanted some proof from Avon, it was to this moment he would look back, rather than anything before or since. Avon's arms around him, Avon looking into his eyes, unsmiling, holding nothing back. It was a rare and precious moment of trust and perfect understanding.

Then Avon sighed a little, his breath warm and familiar on Blake's face, and said, "Then you had better go..." 

Sentiment is a weakness. You could almost hear Avon say it aloud, or something similar. Sex was the best, the only excuse for intimacy. Nothing else would do - not this, no simple desire for comfort or company, for love. 

But Avon let him stay. What did that say?

 

 

If Blake had known exactly what passed for peace aboard the Liberator at that moment, he would not have slept so well. On arrival at Chrysos, Zen had informed the crew of another ship of unknown origin in orbit around the planet. Looking at it carefully, they had come to the conclusion, backed by Orac, that it was Servalan's ship.

"That's it," Vila said nervously. "Let's go. I love women but I draw the line at Servalan."

Jenna and Cally each cast him a look of scorn. It had not escaped the notice of either that Vila was not entirely happy without Blake around, or without Avon. Which was an insult to their sex: they were as good as men, any day.

"Blake gave us a job to do and we're going to do it," Jenna answered crisply, sighting in the orbit correlation carefully, pausing to double-check. Her long hair fell forward. Impatiently, she tossed it back.

"We are on a mission of mercy, Vila," Cally put in. "The Chrysoans will give us protection."

Vila gave her a haunted look. "I wouldn't count on that. Servalan doesn't play by the rules of the Orion Covention, you know."

"It's one small ship, Vila," Jenna said with utter scorn. "You may be afraid of Servalan but Cally and I are not."

"The more fools you, then," Vila said. "Nothing wrong with a little healthy fear. A good dose per day keeps the Reaper at bay - that's what my old nanny used to say to me and she was never wrong, you know."

 

 

With grave formality, Jenna Stannis did all the right things. She spoke to the Chrysoan Space Command, explained the purpose of their visit, requested an orbit holding pattern and safe passage to the embassy. Within one hour they were in the Chrysoan Council Chamber, handing over one hundred litres of distilled and prepared plague antidote, complete with the recipe. Vila hadn't wanted to go but did, because staying behind alone with Servalan in the offing seemed marginally worse. After accepting the offering, the five Elders who had come to greet them dispersed, leaving them with only Dersik, the Lord of the Elders, to wind up formalities. 

"Please convey to Blake our gratitude," he said with chilly politeness. "I had hoped to speak with him in person, to resolve some - residual problems. But we must, in all honour, only accept these drugs on the understanding that we can give him little in return."

"Blake doesn't want anything in return," Cally said, hotly on the defensive. "That is not his way."

"No, he's prone to these wild gestures of generosity," Vila said with gloomy resignation. "We've only spent a week looking for ingredients, broken our backs collecting them for you and come half-way across the galaxy into hostile space to bring them to you. Why the hell should we want anything in return? That's more Servalan's way of doing things - and by the way, have you noticed her falling over herself to help you? No? Well, there's a surprise."

"Yes, if you don't mind us saying so," Jenna said directly, "you'd do a great deal better sticking with Blake than throwing in your lot with the Federation."

Dersik eyed her with hauteur, lifting his chin as he replied, "We could never ally ourselves with a man who betrayed my daughter and violated our trust as a nation."

They couldn't let it go; they were Blake's crew. "How exactly did he betray your daughter?" Jenna asked with disbelief.

"He married her," Vila put in. "I know that much. I was there. Perfectly legal, it was. And knowing Blake, I can't believe-" 

Delicacy forbade Vila to complete the thought and say, '-that Blake was rough with her in bed.' But brave Jenna took up the cudgels. 

"What my colleague means to say," she said with sweet force, "is that, knowing Blake as we do, none of us will ever believe that he is capable of behaving towards your daughter with anything other than honour."

"He is not a man of vice," Cally said, in her gentle, grave way.

"What I say is true," Dersik reiterated. "But, of course, offworlders cannot be expected to understand our ways and we ourselves were at fault for not being more thorough in our precautions. However, I believe he must have understood that to wed my daughter, when he was not free to do so, meant that the contract could not be valid - and thus the honour of my daughter was violated by Blake, without the sanctity of marriage."

Not free? They glanced at each other, uncomprehending.

"Don't you know what he means?" A new voice entered the discussion from behind: a cold, gentle voice, self-satisfied, unmistakeable. 

"Servalan," Jenna sighed. So the Chrysoans were being courted by the Federation again. 

She turned to see Servalan posed dramatically in the doorway in a black sheath dress which encased her like the barrel of some slick weapon. "Haven't you heard of the old custom of calling the banns?" she said, smiling. "It must have prevented a good many - violations, like that of Dersik's daughter." 

With that, she advanced into the room, smiling, hips shimmying from side to side. Vila recoiled, took a step backwards. 

"Do you mean," she enquired, delighted, "that Blake has never told you? Dear me. And I always assumed that, on the Liberator, democracy would be adhered to like a religion." 

Servalan was really pleased with herself, enjoying this. They could see that. Bad news. 

"Not - free?" Cally asked, puzzled. "Do you mean Blake already had a wife?" 

That was perfectly possible, of course. Blake had never mentioned one from his past life but that didn't mean it was out of the question.

Servalan smiled again, white teeth perfect. "Oh, hardly. You don't mind if I sit down?" Without waiting for a reply, she folded gracefully into a chair with a rustle of silk. "There are two of my guards outside, so don't get any ideas, will you? Though I imagine you find ideas somewhat hard to come by, when your leader and his right-hand knight are away. Where are they, by the way?" Her neat dark head swivelled enquiringly on its long white neck.

"Not here," Jenna said shortly, her palms sweaty and her heart racing. Something, everything about the other woman made her flesh creep.

"Doesn't that make you rather - vulnerable?" murmured Servalan.

"Supreme Commander," Dersik said, with his own dignity, without undue awe, "it must be understood that these people are here as neutrals, supplying medical relief, and as such, must not be touched by you or your people, either here or within the exclusion zone of space."

Servalan inclined her head graciously. "Of course, of course. I understand diplomatic protocol quite as well as you, I assure you."

"In any case, we must be going," Jenna said, with awful disdain, eager to get away. She had a nasty sense of premonition about the wicked light which danced in Servalan's eye. All of Servalan's secrets were nasty ones and painful in the telling, at least for the listeners.

"Just a moment," Servalan said. "We have some unfinished business... Did I, a few moments ago, get the impression that you - Blake's crew and his friends - don't know about the vile trick he played on this honourable gentleman here?" 

They were free to go. They really should. Yet they had all of them wondered, speculated even, over what had gone wrong between Blake and the Chrysoan Elders. Now it seemed they were going to find out.

"This gentleman's daughter," Servalan mourned. "A young virgin child, forced into a diplomatic marriage with an outlaw twice her age - and one, it must be said, without the nicest of morals." 

Jenna exclaimed at this and Cally said warmly, "Blake is a good man. There is nothing wrong with his morals."

"You see?" Servalan appealed to Dersik, more in sorrow than in anger. "His crew call the tried and convicted assault of minors 'nothing'. Whereas I, I am afraid, would call it paedophilia, the abuse of children. But it seems, in any case, that his tastes have matured since. Your daughter, I believe, was post-pubertal?"

"No," Jenna said stonily, white-faced. "This woman is poisonous, sir. It does you no service to listen to her."

"But you must listen to me," Servalan said smoothly. "Believe me, I'm not enjoying myself. I feel, however, that it is my duty, however unpleasant it may be for me, to enlighten you as to the little deception practised upon you by the man you have chosen to follow. A few months ago, not very much prior to his dalliance with this good gentleman's favoured, virgin child-"

"Oh, get on with it," snapped Jenna.

"Blake married. Whom did he marry, I hear you ask?" 

No one asked. After a second, Servalan continued blithely, "Your colleague. The one with the talent, the taste for crime. Why did he decide to waste it all on Blake? Sex, I fear, must be at the root of it all. But we'll probably never know. I hardly imagine they're going to be honest about it."

The horrible dawning of understanding forced only silence from Jenna and Cally, so Vila's voice prevailed. "Not - Avon? You can't mean Avon. Tell me I'm not hearing this."

"Avon," Servalan sighed, pleased, and Cally drew in a breath, her eyebrows narrowing swiftly over eyes dark with disbelief. 

"I don't believe you."

But Jenna did. Standing there, erect and proud, chalk-white and trembling, she knew it was as real as the moon in the sky. 

"Jenna," Cally appealed to her. "It can't be-"

"It is," Jenna said in a dead and quiet voice. "If she says so, then it's true."

"You mean Blake-?"

"Why would she make it up?" Jenna said, hard and fast. "Blake would only deny it and laugh in our faces and hers. It's true, believe me."

Vila's face twisted with this momentous new uncertainty in the face of the universe. "Blake and Avon-"

"The greatest love affair, perhaps, since Romeo and Juliet?" mused Servalan. "Perhaps a little more sordid... a little less natural..." She looked around at them all, more than satisfied with the impact of her news. "Aren't you going to join me, now you know by what manner of a man you are led?"

"Thank you, no," Jenna said, all steel. She drew in another deep breath, summoned all of her resources. "You know what they say - even a rotten egg tastes sweeter than the arse of the ostrich who laid it. And now you must excuse us. We really must be going."

"You could, perhaps, surprise them with a honeymoon party."

"Oh, I think we should," Jenna agreed, head held high, and they left.

 

 

The Liberator, Blake estimated, should be back in teleport range within half an hour. Jenna's voice, when he had spoken to her over the Saracen's com channel, had sounded as strained and hostile as when he had last confronted her. He sighed, anticipating another nervewracking round of interposing himself between Jenna and Avon, and then smiled wryly. Easier by far to deal with Jenna's understandable hostility than with the inexplicable hostility of Grethe and Dav.

Better the devil you know... 

Oh well, he wouldn't have to concern himself with Dav's sneers or Grethe's obsessive concentration on Avon for very much longer. Cheered by that thought, Blake went striding down the corridor in search of Avon, to make sure there were no remaining tasks that might delay their departure. He found Avon in the rec room but, to his annoyance, Avon was sequestered at a table in the farthest corner, talking, low and intent, to the ubiquitous Grethe, who drew her silvery eyebrows together in a frown, laid a possessive hand on Avon's arm and showed him something shielded by her other hand. Blake took a step forward, intending to resume his role as Avon's unofficial bodyguard, but for some reason he felt oddly reluctant to interrupt the conversation.

Warned off by the defensive hunch of Avon's shoulder, perhaps, or the rather unnerving vulnerability expressed in Avon's widened eyes and parted lips? 

Or perhaps, more pragmatically, reassured by the knowledge that this was, after all, Grethe's last chance to trouble Avon?

At any rate, he turned away before the other two could see him and went roaming on down to the lower levels of the ship - not for any particular purpose, simply to keep himself out of the Saracen crew's way until it was time to leave. He paused by the silver dome that guarded the main drive, smiling when he remembered Avon walking suitless into the dome, as foolhardy in pursuit of his own theories as he had ever accused Blake of being. The smile broadened as Blake indulged some more seductive memories. He reached out and rested his hand lightly on the control panel that Avon had laboured over for the past few days, as if he could reach back through time and touch Avon's phantom hand.

And a red light at the top of the panel flickered once, then dimmed.

Blake froze. Having been in charge of Avon's tool kit, as a justification for his presence on Saracen, he recognised the signal - the same signal that had pulsed continuously from the panel until Avon had begun his repairs. For half a minute, he tried desperately to convince himself that he had imagined the brief flash of light but then the scarlet flicker pulsed again, short-circuiting all attempts at self-deception. Blake snatched up a rad counter and hurried across to the dome, checked the figures in the display window and laughed out loud. 

The radiation levels were exactly as they should be. So, for once, Avon's repair job had fallen short of his usual high standards. Apparently, the early warning system on the ship's computer was about to malfunction again.

He stood there, staring at the faint pulse from the control panel, caught between conflicting emotions - amusement at finding that his perfectionist computer expert could, on occasion, be less than perfect; frustration at the prospect of being stranded on the Saracen for another day or so. Then, gradually, he realised there was an alternative solution to the problem. 

Grethe Yavitz knew the Saracen's computer. Grethe had watched every move Avon made, competing with Blake to offer her assistance. Grethe had undoubtedly memorised every stage of the repairs.

Let her find and fix the second faulty detector circuit, then. Blake was tired of the tensions on Saracen. He wanted to take Avon back to the Liberator, to explore the fragile peace they had found together, last night in Avon's cabin - and, of course, to celebrate the success of the Chrysos mission with the rest of his crew. 

 

 

It was not so much a party on board the Liberator as a wake. If only he'd told me about the marriage, Jenna kept on thinking. If only he'd been honest with me. I would have understood why Avon always seemed so important to him, then. I would never have allowed myself to... 

And Cally, struggling to make sense of it all, mourning the death of hopes she had never fully admitted.

Only Vila, amused and interested, wanting neither man himself, was not touched by it in a personal way. Indeed, it seemed to him like a heaven-sent opportunity. Back on the Liberator's flight-deck, he put an arm around both women, leering into Jenna's face. 

"Well, ladies, since it seems I'm the only man around here-"

"Fool," Jenna said sharply, snapping herself out of his embrace and sitting down well away.

"It's funny," Vila sighed. "I always thought you and Blake-"

"Shut up, Vila," Cally said sharply and went to sit near the other woman. "Can't you have some tact?"

Jenna looked across and smiled at her shakily. Dear Cally, so fierce on her behalf. "It isn't really what you think. I knew about Blake and Avon, although Blake never mentioned this... marriage."

"You knew!" Vila exclaimed, staring at her wide-eyed. "But they fight all the time. You know what they're like - well, what I thought they were like. Just a front, I suppose."

"No," Cally said, frowning. "Such emotions cannot be faked."

Vila shrugged. "Hardly a marriage made in heaven, then."

The world was spinning all around them. "It's been going on for a long time, you know," Jenna said, her face sharp, her skin pale.

"Made in hell, more like," Vila said.

 

 

Blake glanced through the door of the Saracen's rec room, strode across to the corner table and dropped a kit bag at Avon's feet.

"Ready, Avon?" he said briskly, ignoring a hiss of protest from Grethe. "I've made our farewells to Griffen and the others. Jenna says she's standing by, prepared for teleport."

The subtlest hint of scorn tightened Avon's mouth and dilated his nostrils. "And, naturally, we must always do as Jenna says," he replied, his voice iced with innuendo.

Blake stared uncomprehendingly, then frowned at the recollection of Jenna's latest gibe. "She's not exactly asking you to lick my boots," he growled. "Nor am I, Avon. I'm just telling you it's time to return to the Liberator."

"Ah, but I might not be as eager to return as you seem to think," Avon countered. He hesitated and squared his shoulders, as if coming to a decision, and said, "As a matter of fact, Blake, I intend to stay here on Saracen."

Beside him, Grethe stirred and smiled - a smug, triumphant smile that set Blake's heart pounding with sudden fury. He glanced down at Avon, hoping to read the man's motives from those darkly enigmatic eyes. But Avon was giving nothing away - nothing, that is, apart from his adamant determination to resist Blake in every way and at every opportunity.

"This is ridiculous, Avon," he snapped incautiously. "I simply don't believe you."

Avon leaned back in his chair and flourished a negligent hand. "Believe whatever you like, Blake," he said. "You always do. The fact remains, I will not be leaving with you."

The force of that statement struck Blake like a blow. Evidently, this went deeper than Avon's usual desire to provoke and torment. If he really meant it... If Grethe had somehow convinced him... 

He flinched abruptly, sickened by the pain of imagining a future without Avon but braced, even before the pain ebbed, to fight for what he wanted. Blake had always been a fighter, always, and this time the outcome was more important to him than he liked to admit.

"Why, Avon?" he demanded. "You could have mentioned this earlier, you know. It seems a strange time to introduce the subject, only seconds before we're due to leave."

He tried to meet and hold Avon's gaze but Avon refused to cooperate, staring obdurately down at a square of card that he was twisting between his fingers. Instead, Grethe answered for him.

"Perhaps Avon was afraid you would force him to submit, if you gave him any advance warning," she murmured. "You can be rather - dominating, Blake."

Her wide blue eyes offered a pretence of solicitude and sympathy but Blake glimpsed a fiery gleam of pure pleasure, hidden in their azure depths. That sparked a memory: another scarlet flicker, seen not so long ago. Without pausing to think it through, he let his anger erupt and drive his left hand forward, to grasp the front of Avon's tunic and haul him out of his seat. At the same time, his right hand bunched into a fist, pulling back and aiming and slamming into Avon's face.

Avon reeled and staggered, the card fluttering unnoticed from his slackened grip. As he collided with the wall and slid slowly down it, Blake dropped to his knees and clasped a teleport bracelet around Avon's wrist. 

"Blake," Grethe said urgently. "Blake, you can't do that. He wants to stay here." 

"Well, we can't always have what we want, can we?" Blake said curtly. He activated his own bracelet, hoisted the kit bag and snarled, "Jenna? Bring us up."

At the last moment, he bent to scoop up the card, moved by some obscure desire to prove that he intended Avon no harm - or to leave Grethe with nothing that was Avon's. Grethe was on her feet, reaching frantically for Avon, when the teleport took them.

 

 

It would, no doubt, have disconcerted the crew of the Liberator hugely, had their leader and his crewmate returned hand-in-hand, very much lovers. Far from that, it was absolutely business as usual. Blake materialised stony-faced, Avon beside him with a swelling eye, spitting fire and fury. The minute their forms coalesced into solidity, Blake released Avon's arm, which he had been gripping tightly, threw it away from his side and stormed out of the teleport bay, snapping, "Well, that was quite a surprise. Got any more?"

Avon was clearly almost too furious to speak. "Whatever gives you the right-?" He stopped, then set off down the corridor, every step striking down with a ringing rap of fury. 

"Oh, welcome back," Jenna said dryly. 

"Nothing's changed, then," Vila observed.

"We need to talk," said Cally. 

"Give me a minute, will you?" Blake rapped out, staring after Avon's rapidly retreating figure with balled fists, his bodyline rigid, hunched. "For crying out loud-"

"Blake." 

This time it was Jenna. No denying Jenna. 

Blake looked at her. She met his eyes, head tossed back. 

Then Cally laid a hand on his arm. "It concerns both of you," she said and Avon heard that and turned.

"Well, now," he said, his anger muted for Cally's sake but not abated, "what, exactly, do you mean by that?"

Cally paled, even so, taking a step away from Blake. Jenna drew in a long, unsteady breath, struggling with the enormity of what she had to say, here, in front of them all. 

"Oh, come on," Vila blurted into the silence, edgy and aggrieved. "You must've both been in it. A man can't get married all on his own - not even you, Avon."

Blake flinched, looking deep into Jenna's eyes for a shamed, apologetic instant, then turned his head away, unable to endure the silent reproach he found there. Instead, he glanced across to the corridor, wondering how Avon would take it. Avon's mouth had thinned and his eyes were narrowed in calculation but as Blake watched, he tipped his head back and, amazingly, laughed out loud. 

"So that's it," he said mockingly. "You have been informed - do I detect Servalan's hand in this? - that Blake... and I occasionally indulge in sexual congress. Hardly a world-shattering discovery, Vila. I'm sure you will be able to adjust to the knowledge, given time." 

He touched a hand to his swollen eye and darted a poisonous glance at Blake, who scowled and swung away, dropping Orac's key into place and requesting a report on the Saracen's movements. While Orac hummed busily, Avon shrugged and turned his back on them all, as if nothing more needed to be said. Before he could leave, however, Jenna hurried over to him, breaking into a run in her anxiety to cut off his exit.

"But... marriage?" she said, puzzled, almost pleading. "That's not precisely - what did you call it, Avon? An occasional sexual indulgence."

Avon tilted his head and surveyed her with casual superiority, a god deigning to answer some importunate prayer. "You think not?" he asked politely. "Perhaps you had to be there, to understand the implications - or the lack of them. Remember, Blake is above the considerations that might trouble lesser mortals. He never lets unimportant details come between himself and his latest - whim." 

He swung back then and confronted Blake directly, daring him to challenge this version of events. Blake was still wondering how he felt about hearing a promise to 'love, honour and support' relegated to the status of an unimportant detail, when Orac's circuitry flashed and crackled.

"The cargo-class cruiser Saracen has stalled again," it announced with its usual pompous self-importance. "Its main drive unit appears to be malfunctioning in the same fashion as before."

"What?" Avon exclaimed, for once visibly disconcerted. "But that's impossible. I fixed-"

He broke off and ran full tilt towards the flight deck. Blake followed at a more leisurely pace, biting his knuckle to conceal a smile at the ungainly haste that genuine emergencies always startled out of Avon. By the time he arrived, Avon had already ordered Zen to bring up an image on the viewscreen: a gulf of night-dark space, riddled with stars, and the little cruiser stranded in the middle distance.

Cally hurried to the com console, Jenna took her position at the pilot's station and the others clustered around the viewscreen, staring in disbelief as a sleek, streamlined pursuit ship hove into view and sped straight to the Saracen.

"That's Servalan's ship!" Jenna called out. "If I bring the Liberator back within firing range, we can take her. Vila, stand by to activate the neutron blasters."

"No, wait!" Blake commanded, flinging an arm out to bar Vila's way. "Let's stay where we are, for the moment. I want to see what happens next."

Jenna arched an eyebrow at him, clearly unconvinced by this line of argument, but she lifted her hands from the controls without any overt protest. They watched in silence while Servalan's ship docked alongside the Saracen, hung suspended there for several minutes, then disengaged and turned and sped away, as suddenly and purposefully as it had appeared.

Avon had been frowning at the screen, alert and focused, but now, with the release of tension, he staggered slightly, clutched the back of the flight deck couch to support himself.

"Ah," he said, from lips drained of all their usual colour. "So that's it."

"Yes, I'm afraid so," Blake replied, uncharacteristically gentle. "I had my suspicions but I needed to be sure."

He moved closer, flanking Avon protectively, as if he could interpose his body to shield Avon from this new and unwelcome knowledge. Vila glanced from one man to the other and let out an ostentatious sigh.

"Well, I'm glad it makes sense to both of you," he said. "But frankly, it's a mystery to me. What on earth did Servalan want with-?"

"Shut up, Vila," Cally interrupted. "I am trying to communicate with the Saracen. Commander Griffen, would you mind repeating what you told me, for the benefit of the rest of our crew?"

She depressed a switch and Axel Griffen's deep voice echoed out across the flight deck, sharpened now by bemusement and alarm.

"We just received a visit from Supreme Commander Servalan," he said, rolling out the syllables of the title with deliberate irony. "She seemed to be expecting to find Avon here - and she was most disconcerted when she realised he had departed. However, she settled for taking Grethe Yavitz and her sister. As a matter of fact, Grethe positively insisted on it. She said-" 

He paused for thought, then quoted, " 'Blake's onto us. I shan't be able to use the Anna connection now. You'll have to find some other way.' " 

Another pause and then Griffen resumed wryly, "I hope that means more to you than it does to me, Blake. And I hope you won't mind lending Avon to us again, to reverse the damage Grethe's done to our main drive."

Avon sighed resignedly and pushed himself upright but Blake shook his head in adamant refusal.

"Not this time," he said, both to Griffen and to Avon. "I'm not prepared to risk it, not while Servalan's ship is still anywhere in the same sector. Avon's familiar with your systems now. He can talk you through the repair job from Liberator."

Griffen grumbled about that but, of necessity, capitulated. For the next twenty minutes, Avon hunched over the com console, sketching diagrams of the Saracen's circuitry on a vidlink, outlining the relevant procedures with rapid-fire concision. Happily, Griffen proved to be a quick study and, to Blake's considerable relief, the ship's computer was restored to working order without any further interruption from the Federation. 

As the Saracen moved off, to the accompaniment of fervent thanks from Griffen and even the resistant Dav, Avon straightened up and stretched his cramped muscles, then collapsed onto the couch. Vila trotted across to him, bearing two fluorescent green glasses of soma and adrenalin.

"Here," he said, presenting a glass to Avon. "You look as though you need it."

Blake leaned over his shoulder and captured the second glass. "Thanks, Vila," he said with ferocious good humour. "That's very thoughtful of you."

Vila blinked but released the glass. "You can drink a toast to getting rid of the Saracen," he suggested, watching rather wistfully as Avon raised his glass to his lips. "More trouble than they were worth, if you ask me - and I couldn't follow that story of Griffen's, either. What's the Anna connection? I don't know any Annas - well, apart from Avon's old girlfriend, at any rate."

"Congratulations, Vila," Avon drawled. "By some lucky accident, you have stumbled over the correct conclusion. Grethe Yavitz claimed, perhaps even truthfully, to have known Anna Grant. She also claimed to have heard rumours that Anna was still alive, although the rumours were presumably as untrustworthy as Grethe herself. However, at the time she used that to persuade me to stay on board Saracen, clearly with the intention of delivering me into Servalan's hands."

Vila frowned, thinking it through. "So Grethe set up the first breakdown - and the attack by those pursuit ships was faked too, I suppose - as a way of getting you across to their ship. But why go to all that trouble, when Servalan could have just sent in a few more pursuit ships and blown us apart?"

"Servalan's always wanted to get her hands on Liberator," Blake reminded him. "Besides, she's still smarting from the double defeat of relinquishing Avon and then losing Orac. Destroying us from a distance wouldn't be anywhere near satisfying enough for her. I suspect she was aiming for a more protracted form of revenge - a direct revenge on Avon, who would presumably have been returned to the hands of her torturers, leading to an indirect revenge on me."

Vila opened his mouth to ask how kidnapping Avon could serve as revenge on Blake, took the point and shut his mouth with an audible click of teeth. Cally intervened, to cover the unspoken gaffe.

"Then it is fortunate that Grethe didn't succeed in persuading you to quit the Liberator, Avon," she observed.

"Oh, but she did," Avon said pleasantly. He caressed the swelling below his eye, adding, "However, Blake has - his own methods of persuasion."

Vila stared, assimilating this new information. "You were going to run off with Grethe?" he said incredulously. "But I thought you and Blake-"

Cally groaned, softly and despairingly. Jenna made a sudden, jerky movement of protest. Vila clamped his mouth shut again, a little too late. An embarrassed silence ensued, which Avon did nothing to break, leaning back and studying the others with a faint half-smile, while Blake hovered behind him, waiting to see which way the situation would develop.

As it turned out, there were no further developments, not that evening. The second crisis with the Saracen had welded the five of them into an efficient unit, patching the cracks caused by Servalan's revelations. But now that the crisis had passed, the initial awkwardness was returning, loading every casual comment with unanticipated innuendo, causing gazes to falter and sentences to trail away, unhappily aborted. 

Jenna was the first to murmur some cursory excuse and leave, choosing the exit furthest from Blake as an indication that she was not tacitly inviting him to come after her, that she sincerely wanted to be on her own. Cally followed in short order, omitting the excuse, and Vila, left alone with Blake and Avon, shuffled and stammered, stared down at his feet and then frankly bolted.

Avon laughed. "How charmingly tactful. I believe they are allowing the happy couple some time together," he said with waspish malice, as Blake settled beside him. "Well, as it happens, there is something I want to ask you. How did you come to realise what Grethe had planned? - assuming there was some sort of logic behind your decision to knock me out, that is, rather than a simple display of Neanderthal possessiveness."

Blake had been about to tender an apology but that gibe seemed to cancel any need for one. He shrugged and said, "I happened to notice a warning light on the main drive's control panel. I suppose I should have told you about it but... well, considering the company, I wasn't anxious to extend our stay on Saracen."

That sounded more irresponsible than it had felt at the time. To avoid meeting Avon's eyes, he fumbled in his pockets and produced the square of card.

"By the way, I retrieved this for you," he said. "Don't worry, I haven't looked at it."

"Oh, there are no secrets on board this ship," Avon said, blandly ironic. "Servalan has made sure of that. Here, Blake. A present from Grethe. You always were curious about Anna Grant. This is a chance to make your own assessment of her."

A flick of his wrist, adept as one of Vila's conjuring tricks, turned the card in his grasp and revealed a hologrammatic portrait. A woman with bare, pearly shoulders surmounted by a slender column of a neck, her pale cheeks hazed with a perpetual rosy blush. Winged eyebrows arched over deepset grey-blue eyes, framed by a fine, feathery drift of light brown hair. 

"She looks very - gentle," Blake said haltingly. "Almost fragile. Rather like Cally, in a way."

Avon leaned towards him and gazed down at the holo, examining it with reawakened curiosity. "Oh, Blake," he sighed, casually contemptuous. "What an innocent you are. Anna was exciting, yes, but gentle - never. I told you before that I had learned about the more exquisite properties of pain. Anna Grant was my first - and best - teacher."

"Better than Ast Vincitti?" Blake asked, before he could stop himself.

As soon as the words were out, he regretted them, bitterly and intensely. But while he floundered in a morass of apology, Avon laughed and, perverse as ever, chose to treat Blake's question as part of the ordinary currency of conversation, rather than a clumsy reference to a forbidden topic.

"Ah, that was quite different," he said amiably. "Vincitti was merely a professional - although an extraordinarily inventive one, granted. Anna, in contrast, was an artist. I met her when a lingering dissatisfaction with my previous sexual encounters prompted me to take up an invitation to join a rather exclusive S/M club." He glanced back at the holo with a rich flutter of eyelashes and said, marvelling, "My first time there and I attracted the attention of the most famed dominatrix in all the Domes... but then, I've always been lucky that way."

Blake glanced back at the holo, this time looking past pearly skin and feathered curls to the indulgent confidence in the tilt of Anna's head; the dangerous glint that brightened the grey-blue eyes; the narrow, steely line of the upper lip, negating the promise implicit in the lower lip's full curve. 

"And was it good luck for you, meeting Anna Grant?" he asked, frowning.

"As lucky as escaping from the London with you," Avon said with vicious emphasis. "Anna had forgotten more about the subtleties of pain than Ast Vincitti will ever know. She was untrammelled by conventional restrictions - safe words and the like - and I was her aptest pupil, or so she told me." 

"No safe words?" Blake said incredulously. "No way of evening the power balance or setting your own boundaries? Avon, that wasn't sex, that was abuse - or, at best, a bad case of folie a deux. It's no wonder Vincitti found you an easy mark." 

Avon went very still. "You don't understand, do you, Blake?" he said, icily aloof. "Before I met Anna Grant, I believed no one could ever match me. But Anna did more than that. She mastered me. Her - death - left me with a debt I can never repay." 

The holo was trembling in Blake's hand, agitating the image in a way that made Anna Grant appear to lift her head and smile slightly. Avon frowned, disturbed by the confluence of that knowledgeable smile and Blake's na{\239}ve consternation. He whisked the holo from Blake's hand and turned it face down on the seat between them, wondering whether he had already said more than he should. On reflection, he decided that the answer was an unqualified 'yes'. Disturbing enough to have found himself justifying his role in Anna's death to Anna's angry brother, several months ago on Albian.

Even more disturbing now to find himself justifying Anna's role in his life to Blake, who had not - this time - formulated any accusations against him. 

There was, really, only one possible way to rectify that miscalculation. Rather than backing down, Avon began to describe some of the lessons he had learned from Anna, neglecting no detail and sparing no implication, his voice as precise and diamond-edged as if he were inducting Blake into some of the more arcane mysteries of Zen's workings. It was, in one way, an attempt to force-feed Blake's curiosity until it died a natural death - and yet, at the same time, Avon gradually came to realise that he was constructing a memorial to Anna: mourning her, even. 

After Grethe's betrayal, Anna felt more lost to him than ever before. It was a relief to fill the emptiness inside him with words and memories - and then there was the added satisfaction of watching Blake, who believed himself equal to anything, turn paler by degrees as the lyrical recital continued. When Avon reached out and touched a finger to his cheek, Blake palpably flinched away from him.

"Well?" he asked, cold and relentless. "Have you heard enough, Blake?"

Blake nodded curtly and then bowed his head, unable to match Avon's tainted smile. It was ironic, really. He had waited a long time for this conversation, convinced that he saw, far more clearly than Avon, how the currents of sexual powerplays swirled and ebbed between them, how tempted they both were by the polarities of dominance and submission. 

Now Avon was in the mood to talk and Blake found himself a reluctant listener. In the harsh light of Avon's disclosures, all Blake's shocking, exciting fantasies of Avon, bound and helpless before him, seemed like the innocent imaginings of a schoolboy hovering on the brink of puberty. If Ast Vincitti was a professional and Anna Grant was an artist, what did that make him? The rankest of amateurs, clearly - a man unable to conceive of, let alone engage in, the most innocuous of the activities that Avon had just outlined. 

"Yes, that'll do," he said brusquely. "As it happens, I'm more interested in establishing how Grethe knew Anna. Was she a member of your exclusive club, by any chance?"

Avon eyed him benignly, seeing through the subterfuge but opting to indulge Blake's need to change the subject.

"Hardly," he said. "I would have recognised her, in that case. I believe Grethe attended the same university as Anna, then met her again later, shortly before Anna and I planned to escape together. However, I'm not sure of the details. I knew nothing about Anna's other life, not even her real name - or her married name, I should say: she always insisted that 'Anna Grant' represented her true identity."

Blake blinked, startled by this casual revelation of a husband in the offing. On consideration, he decided not to follow that tangent, choosing instead to concentrate on defining Grethe's role in Anna's life and Servalan's plans.

"Well, if Grethe was already working for the Federation, that may have brought back in touch with Anna," he commented.

It was a shot in the dark but Avon gasped and glanced up, as startled and pained as if the shot had ripped through his own flesh.

"You think Anna was employed by the Federation?" he said with reflexive scorn. "Blake, that's absurd. Anna collaborated with me on the bank fraud. It was, indeed, originally her idea."

And now, it seemed, they had come to the crux of the matter - Avon's secret motive for choosing to impart more information about Anna Grant than he had ever volunteered before. He was, not for the first time, employing Blake to say for him things he was not yet prepared to say for himself. Grethe's convenient appearance and her even more convenient dossier on Anna, right down to the detail of the holo, must, inevitably, have prompted a man of Avon's suspicious nature to ask some more far-reaching questions. But Avon, fiercely loyal once his loyalty was given, could never openly admit that he had begun to doubt Anna's allegiance.

Blake found that, when it came to the point, he could not bear to destroy Avon's faith in Anna, either.

"Yes, that's precisely what I meant," he said with bland reassurance. "If the Federation had caught a whiff of the bank job, they might well have sent Grethe to investigate, which could, in turn, explain why Servalan chose her for this latest mission. The coincidence of finding someone on a ship bound for Chrysos, who also knew Anna's background, must have been too convenient to resist."

Avon frowned, clearly less than comforted by this line of reasoning. "Ah, well, it's all in the past now," he said dismissively. "Even Anna proved more vulnerable than I thought her to be."

He flipped the holo over and frowned down at Anna's ethereal beauty, his eyes shadowy and haunted, unutterably bleak. In that moment, Blake saw it all, as vivid as some vision in a crystal ball - a younger Avon, attracted by Anna's promised strength, secure in the belief that she could look, unflinching, into the depths of his dark, tormented nature, then contain it and control it; the older Avon, morbidly convinced there was no safety anywhere, because he destroyed everything he touched. 

People's histories made them what they were. Lacking a secure sense of his personal history, Blake forgot that, sometimes. Now his hand lifted of its own accord, seeking to settle on Avon's shoulder in a belated gesture of reassurance.

But before he could reach out, Avon seized the holo and gripped its opposing corners, preparing to rip it in two.

Blake's hands dropped down, faster than thought, imprisoning Avon's wrists. "Don't," he said involuntarily. "You'll only regret it later" and then, as Avon lifted dazed, distracted eyes, "Be grateful that you have memories, Avon, even if they're not entirely pleasant."

Avon's eyes cleared. He stared back steadily, acknowledging the reference. "Perhaps you're right," he conceded. "You can release me now, Blake. The impulse towards vandalism has passed."

When Blake took his hands away, Avon smoothed a crumpled corner of the holo with meticulous care and pocketed it. Then, as if he had set the past aside, along with Anna's image, he met Blake's eyes again, insidious and inviting.

"You must be tired, after listening to those old stories," he murmured. "Shall we go to bed now?"

A welcome offer, made with all the seductive power of which Avon was capable. And yet - and yet, for some reason, Blake hesitated. 

"Together or separately?" he asked bluntly. "I rather thought you might prefer to be alone tonight."

He frowned then, puzzled by his own motivations. Unwilling to compete with Avon's memories of Anna or, more altruistically, concerned to give Avon a little space in which to grieve for the past, before they moved on into the inexorable future? Either way, it appeared that he had said the right thing. Avon looked up, disconcerted, considered the offer for a few brief seconds and rose to his feet.

"I believe I do want to be alone," he said, as if surprised at the need or, perhaps, at Blake's identification of it. He dallied beside the couch a moment longer, then surprised himself - and Blake - even further by adding, "Thank you, Blake" in a soft, rapid undertone, before he turned away.

He paced lightly across the deck and disappeared into the corridor, shadowy among the shadows. Blake stirred and flung himself back on the couch, pleased, on the whole, with the outcome of what could have been a disastrous evening but disinclined to seek an Avonless bed. Thoughts formed and shifted below the surface of his mind, their patterns as mysterious and variable as the play of light across Zan's screen. He felt an odd sense of imminence, an obscure conviction that something had just changed irrevocably, albeit in a way that eluded him, hovering enticingly just beyond his reach.

He was shaken out of his reverie by the tap of boot heels - too light and jaunty to be Avon returning, Blake deduced, even before he looked up to see Jenna, framed by the flight deck's entrance. So his face did not fall - but Jenna's did, feathery eyebrows knotting together, full lower lip pouting, as if she had expected to have the flight deck to herself. Blake struggled into a sitting position and prepared to be sociable but Jenna strode directly across to the pilot's console.

"The Liberator is currently in random orbit," she said in passing. "Since I assumed you wouldn't be setting a new course until tomorrow, I thought I ought to check that we're not likely to run into any asteroid belts."

Blake drew an immediate connection between Jenna's assumption and the fact that she had deliberately left him alone with Avon. To forestall any further outbreaks of tactfulness, he decided an explanation was in order.

"Jenna, about this marriage-" he began, only to be quelled by a dazzlingly bright smile.

"No, Blake," Jenna said firmly. "That's none of my business. I would, really, rather know nothing about it." To underscore the point, she assumed a business-like expression and added, "By the way, I haven't yet had a chance to tell you that the Lord of the Chrysoan Elders had been hoping to speak with you in person - although, unfortunately, we didn't find out what he wanted with you, before Servalan took centre stage."

Blake sighed. "On past form, it's unlikely to be anything pleasant," he said wryly. "However, I suppose I might as well pay the Elders a visit, while we're in the vicinity. Set a course for Chrysos, will you, Jenna?"

She nodded and bent over the console, blonde hair screening her face, taking more time than usual to key in the coordinates. Blake sighed again, accepting the dismissal, said, "Goodnight, then" and left.

 

 

There was no ceremonial reception on Chrysos this time, no meeting in the hall of the Elders or around a camp fire. Instead, Blake teleported down to an isolated glade - one of a series set aside by custom, he had been informed, for any Chrysoans who wished to negotiate in private, outside the bounds of their society, or to meditate alone, without interruption. Tall trees bent protectively over a circle of velvet grass, shutting out the rest of the world, creating a space as secure and separate as a hermit's cell. Blake leaned against a tree trunk, enjoying the chance to breathe real air, not the Liberator's recycled atmosphere, and feel the gentle touch of a breeze caressing his cheek. 

Soothed and relaxed, he barely started when an Elder emerged from the dappled shadows, sombre in a long grey robe tied with rough cord. It was, just as Blake had expected, Dersik, the father of Persis, his - well, 'bride' was the wrong word for it and Blake rejected any harsher alternatives. He smiled, genuinely friendly, but Dersik refused to meet his eyes.

"You should know, Blake, that I am not here as a representative of the Council of Elders," he said, without preliminaries. "I have no authority to make decisions affecting the rest of this planet, which means that I have nothing to offer you, in return for what I am about to ask. But, despite everything, I believe you are... a good man, in your own terms. So I am appealing to you as a father, on behalf of my daughter Persis - and, as well, on your own daughter's behalf."

That snapped Blake's head back, causing him to catch his breath in shock. It was one thing to contemplate the abstract possibility of Persis falling pregnant; quite another thing, he found, to learn that a child had in fact been born to him, here on Chrysos. But the prospect of caring for his own children was only one among the many things the Federation had stolen from him, so he fought down the emotions surging within him and forced himself to concentrate on the issue at hand.

"All right, so I have a daughter," he said, holding his voice steady with an effort. "Isn't that precisely what you wanted - an offworlder's genes, to counter the dangers of inbreeding?"

"And what use are your genes, when the child has no status among us?" Dersik said harshly. "Because you lied to us, your daughter can never find a husband here - nor my daughter, either."

The Elder's uncontained bitterness roused an answering bitterness in Blake. His sojourn on Chrysos had, after all, caused him just as much pain as it could possibly have caused Dersik.

"I understood that Persis would be free to marry again, after I left," he said brusquely. "That being so, her child would presumably come under the protection of her new husband."

"Her child?" Dersik said, cocking a sceptical eyebrow. "That may be how you see it, Blake - I have no knowledge of your customs - but on this planet we abide by the principle of father-right. The child is yours. Marriage would have granted a subsidiary right to Persis, which she could then have transferred to a Chrysoan husband. But since your marriage to Persis was a sham, she and the child must now both remain outcast... unless, by some great good fortune, you were generous enough to set your previous marriage aside and wed Persis again." 

A muffled sound escaped from Blake's throat, more surprise than anything else, but Dersik clearly took it as a sign of protest. He bowed his head and toyed unhappily with the frayed cord that belted his robe.

"I can, as I warned you before, promise nothing," he said, low-voiced and shamed. "However, a second wedding would certainly restore you in our people's esteem... and, naturally, incline me to plead your case to the Council, the Elders being somewhat disillusioned by the Federation's failure to assist us during the plague."

He lifted his head and extended a pleading hand. Blake stared down at it and then abruptly swung away, pacing around the glade, restless and disturbed. Such a simple solution, really. Avon had told him that all records of their marriage on Nirvana had been erased, that they only needed to attend some registration point and declare it void. After that, Blake would be free to make another commitment - a commitment that would restore Persis and the child to their rightful place in Chrysoan society and, quite possibly, bring Chrysos back into the rebel alliance. He would, in short, be solving several problems and creating none.

Why, then, was he hesitating?

Well, for one thing, Chrysos seemed to change allegiances as easily as Servalan changed her gowns. While Blake had no reason to doubt Dersik's sincerity, he had every reason to doubt that the Council of Elders would take a position and stick to it. Consequently, he was no longer prepared to go to any great lengths, on the offchance of winning Chrysos over. 

As for Persis - oh yes, without doubt he owed Persis something, in return for ruining her life.

But not this.

Not marriage... 

Struck by a sudden inspiration, he turned back and confronted Dersik. "You say the child is mine and mine alone?" he demanded. "What if I were to formally assign my rights to Persis - or, if your society can't concede that its women have rights, to you yourself?"

Dersik stiffened. "That is not the honourable solution," he said, his voice heavy with dislike. "But - yes, technically speaking, I suppose it is possible. I could adopt the child, which would free Persis to marry, after which I could transfer the child into her husband's care."

"Then let's do that," Blake said, with an expansive gesture that swept aside the Elder's reluctance. "What kind of documentation would you need?"

"A written statement in your own hand will suffice," Dersik informed him. "I can then arrange for the transaction to be entered in our records."

"Excellent," Blake said heartily. "Consider it done."

He patted the inside pockets of his jerkin, located a note pad and stylus and scribbled down the appropriate formula, to Dersik's dictation. The Elder took the document, thanked Blake grudgingly and stalked out of the glade without a backward glance. 

There goes the grandfather of my only child, Blake thought wryly but he couldn't find it in him to care. The child was provided for, now. She had a loving mother and soon she would have, hopefully, a loving father. Better that Blake should put her out of his mind: better for him and, more importantly, better for her.

And yet, even though he was finished with Chrysos, Blake found himself inclined to linger. The stated purpose of the glade appealed to him. Right now, he felt he could make good use of an opportunity to 'meditate alone, without interruption'. 

Cally was operating the teleport. For all she knew, he could presently be locked in an extended negotiation with half the Council, so she would not be alarmed if he remained here a little longer. And he needed some time to himself, needed it with an urgency that suddenly overwhelmed him. 

Because, if he returned to the Liberator now, he would lose his fragile, half-developed sense that... 

...that his reasons for refusing to dissolve the marriage with Avon were not as pragmatic as he pretended... 

...and that he couldn't bring himself to renege on their contract, not for half a dozen planets.

Blake reeled under the force of that insight. He dropped where he stood and sprawled out full length on the grass, clasping his hands behind his head, staring up with painful concentration at the treetops surrounding a ring of cloudless blue sky where the Liberator circled invisibly. What had happened, to change a casual decision, lightly made and easily forgotten, into the central principle of his existence? Blake had no idea. When he looked back at those brief minutes in the foyer of the hotel on Nirvana, he marvelled at his ready assent to the proprietor's little scam. Had he been prompted by nothing more than simple opportunism or had he, even then, at some subconscious level, yearned to make those promises to Avon?

Love. Honour. Support. No matter what he might have intended at the time, he could never unsay those words, never. 

He loved Avon, that was beyond all doubt now. He honoured Avon's gallant struggle to remain true to himself, in a flawed and venal world that offered far more scope for his detached malice than for his steadfast loyalty and his alert, analytical mind. He wanted to support Avon in that struggle, rather than cooperating with Avon's drive to self-destruction, as he had so often done in the past.

The Federation had, paradoxically, created a powerful weapon against themselves, when they elected to mindwipe Blake. While he had no memories, it had been easy to focus on political struggle, to the exclusion of all else. But, gradually, his developing history with Avon had created memories of its own, replacing the memories he had lost. That moment on Avra Alpha, when Avon caused him to question his most basic beliefs, returned to Blake's mind, but more benignly this time. Now he saw that, in order to resist his own drive towards self-destruction, he had to fight not only for galactic liberation but for something that was his alone - for a better world, where he might, from the beginning, have concentrated some part of his energies on Avon, instead of pouring everything unstintingly into the rebel cause. 

Up until this point, he had, he realised belatedly, been as dangerous as a child armed with a laser cannon - possessing all the power of adult emotion and logic, without the memory of past experiences to show him how to use that power responsibly. And, lacking any guidelines, he had hurt Avon, hurt him so badly and so often that it was nothing short of a miracle that Avon still came back for more. 

True, Avon had hurt him too - but Avon had, at least, known what he was doing. He lashed out in periodic attempts to drive Blake away, to spare himself the pain of loving.

But Blake had hurt Avon by accident, which in retrospect seemed far more culpable. Looking back over the extended catalogue of his angry outbursts, casual betrayals and unthinking evasions, he couldn't, offhand, decide which of those incidents made him wince with the greatest degree of shame and regret. Ever since they had set foot on the Liberator, he had reserved his best emotions for the cause, leaving the worst for Avon. 

Now it was time to redeem himself. But how? 

No point in deluging Avon with apologies: Avon judged people by what they did, not what they said. Some sort of symbolic act, then - something that would help Avon as much as Blake had hurt him? 

Yes, that could be the answer and, if so, he knew the place to start. Ast Vincitti still loitered at the edge of Avon's consciousness, backed, Blake saw now, by the insidious spectre of Anna Grant, the woman who had taught Avon to define love as an inevitable side-effect of abuse. If Blake could break their influence - if he could show Avon that there were other ways of loving, less destructive, more endurable and enduring - that would, surely, be an enterprise worth undertaking.

He smiled with heady satisfaction and scrambled to his feet. Action had always suited Blake better than contemplation. Having come to a decision, he was anxious to make a start.

With plans already forming in his mind, he lifted the teleport bracelet to his lips and rapped out, "Cally, bring me up."

 

 

When he returned to the Liberator, Cally passed on a message from Avalon - a request that they salvage a band of freedom fighters, stranded on Gallica, and ferry them across to Albian. The timing, Blake thought, was perfect. It was a routine chore and, as such, a welcome respite, before he embarked on the next stage of his search for Star One.

A welcome respite, too, from his crew's new and intrusive interest in his private life. While they travelled across to Gallica, Vila made a few tentative attempts at baiting him or, even more cautiously, Avon, testing the ground to see whether there was anything in this latest development that he could turn to his advantage. Luckily, Avalon's freedom fighters included a buxom blonde, not at all averse to some strenuous flirtation, who occupied Vila's attention for the next few days. Cally too, after a rather disconcerting interval where she watched Blake and Avon with grave detachment, sighing occasionally and shaking her head, became absorbed in the process of feeding and healing their guests, while Jenna took the definition of hospitality one step further, inviting one of the younger and more virile freedom fighters to share her cabin.

Blake was glad to be relieved of the pressure of their attention - although not, unfortunately, because it gave him the chance to court Avon without an audience. Avon continued to be remote and withdrawn, spending long hours in one of the sub-control rooms investigating Zen's circuitry, as an excuse for avoiding the influx of visitors. Their return to Albian was not, perhaps, the happiest of coincidences, reawakening Avon's memories of his confrontation with Anna Grant's brother and, no doubt, prolonging the ambivalent grief for Anna stirred up by Grethe's betrayal. 

A grief that, Blake had already decided, was none of his business, so he left Avon to it and concentrated on his own plans, germinated on Chrysos, growing steadily in scope since then.

It was all quite clear to him now. Only two things were lacking - some modifications to his cabin and the right moment to make use of them. Blake found himself enjoying the work, dredging up his old, half-forgotten engineering skills to calculate the specifications Zen required, in order to manufacture the relevant parts, then labouring busily to install them. He teleported down to Albian, along with the freedom fighters, to acquire an extra set of instruments and, incidentally, spend an hour in conversation with Cauder, the rebel leader, who surprised Blake at the end by handing over a sealed envelope, addressed to him by name.

"What's that?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

"Not a love letter, I'm afraid," Cauder said with a grin. "That is, unless Del Grant has more love for you than he appeared to have, on your previous visit here. He left us several months ago, after we'd chased the last remnants of the Federation garrison off planet, but he sent this letter recently, asking me to forward it to you. Apparently, Grant has discovered the current identity and whereabouts of that cybersurgeon you're hunting, through some of his mercenary contacts - although, in his usual ungracious fashion, he states plainly that you can expect no further assistance from him."

"Never mind," Blake said, smiling. "Grant's already done more than I expected. We can handle it, from here on."

He stowed the envelope carefully inside his jerkin and said his farewells to Cauder and the other rebels. Back on Liberator, Cally, Jenna and Vila were gathered on the flight deck, sharing a bottle of Albanese wine while they mourned the departure of their guests. Blake hesitated in the doorway, decided against interrupting the wake and repaired to his cabin, where he stood for several minutes, turning the envelope this way and that between his hands.

Another piece of luck, if luck was the right word for it. He'd always had the devil's own luck and, under those circumstances, there was usually the devil to pay. He would pay, eventually, but for now he set Grant's letter down on his desk, unopened.

Time enough for that later. At present, he had other work to do.

He stripped off his shirt and got down to business, testing the strength of bolts and adjusting screws, polishing metal until it gleamed like a surgeon's scalpel. When the job was complete, Blake unpacked the instruments he had brought back from Albian and arranged them on the bedside table, stepping back to examine the display with a prophetic shiver. Then he collected up the tools scattered around the cabin and stepped out into the corridor, planning to restore them to their usual place before Avon noticed their absence and came knocking at his door.

Oh, he wanted Avon to see what he had done, no question about that. But he wanted it at a time of his own choosing. 

Not yet - not while he was shirtless and sweaty with toil, still distracted by an underlying awareness of the unopened envelope, waiting on his desk.

Intent on his errand, Blake failed to spot Avon, strolling idly down the corridor from the flight deck, until Avon was almost upon him. Hooded eyes mapped his naked chest, caressing smooth hairless skin, dwelling with rakish admiration on his glistening muscles.

"You are an example to us all, Blake," he murmured. "Still labouring away, while the rest of us take our ease. May I ask what you've been working on so assiduously?"

Blake hesitated, disconcerted by the chance encounter. His first impulse was to concoct some sort of story that would put Avon off the scent. But Avon had a keen ear for evasion and untruth; and to lie now might spoil the moment when Blake revealed his intentions; and besides, it could, perhaps, be even more effective to make use of his own discomfort, to proceed with his plan while he still felt wrong-footed and ill at ease. 

He drew in a long deep breath, like a gambler preparing for some crucial throw of the dice.

"By all means, Avon," he said. "Why don't you come and take a look?"

 

Two bolts glinted, embedded in Blake's cabin wall. Two lengths of chain dangled from them, with a handcuff suspended on each, just brushing the top of the pillows. Two manacles rested at the foot of the bed, their chains clamped immovably to the bed frame. Avon ran his eyes across the preparations, assessing them with detached expertise.

"Well, well," he said softly. "You have been busy, Blake. I could never have guessed that my stories about Anna would prove so - inspiring." And then, even more softly, with a corrupt, collusive glance upwards at Blake, "I suppose you want me to test the equipment for you?"

His stance altered subtly, head tilted back, hands spreading slightly - the merest suggestion of how he might look, spreadeagled and chained to Blake's bed, and yet the image instantly, vividly took possession of Blake's mind. He forced it aside, remembered his true purpose here.

"No, Avon," he said steadily. "You're wrong, for once. This is what I want."

He sank down onto the bed, lifting his arms above his head, committing himself, in that moment, to the enterprise. Blake had his pride, just as surely as Avon did. No matter what transpired, he would not back out now.

There was no need for further explanation. Avon knew exactly what he was offering. His pupils widened at the sight before him, taking Blake in like two black holes, dragging him down into their fathomless depths. Then his shoulders tensed and his whole expression sharpened, becoming as avid and predatory as a hunting bird; a falcon perched in readiness on a king's wrist.

"Be careful, Blake," he warned, intimate and knowing. "Don't start anything that you are not prepared to finish."

"Oh, I think I'm fully prepared," Blake retorted, angling an ironic glance at the cuffs and manacles. "But perhaps this isn't to your taste."

"It would not be - my usual preference," Avon conceded. "However, I know more than enough to give you what you seem to need. One last chance, Blake. Shall I go ahead... or would you prefer to reconsider?"

"I didn't ask you in for conversation," Blake said curtly. "Go ahead, Avon. Just get on with it."

Avon smiled, disconcertingly gentle, and leaned down to lock the cuffs around Blake's wrists. Blake had judged the chains' length perfectly. Once the cuffs were in place, his arms strained back, wrenched to the threshold of his endurance, hoisting his torso into a tensile arc. When Avon fitted the manacles onto his ankles, a reciprocal tension drew Blake's body taut. He lay there under Avon's grave, assessing stare, not shaking, precisely, but vibrating in every muscle, assailed by a sudden, desperate fear that he had miscalculated; that he was too much the amateur and Avon could not fail to know it; that he would, in consequence, prove unequal to the task that he had set himself.

As he fought against the fears, Avon stepped back to dim the lights, adjusting the levels with meticulous care, until Blake's body gleamed white in the shadows, its silvery gloss of sweat reflected in the silver of the manacles. He nodded with aesthetic appreciation, drifted over to Blake's side and ran the sharp edge of a fingernail slantwise across an expanse of naked flesh, just barely grazing one nipple. Blake whimpered quietly, not so much, Avon guessed, from the present pain as from the anticipation of pain to come. He gazed down thoughtfully at Blake's heaving chest, the dishevelled curls plastered to his sweaty forehead.

This was not something he had anticipated and yet, now that it had eventuated, he found that he was not, after all, greatly surprised. Somehow, it always seemed to come to this - one person bending to the other's will; one inflicting pain, the other wanting it. 

Interesting, how strangely different it felt to stand on the opposite side of the divide, for the first time in his experience.

"So it's true," he said, imperfectly concealing his disappointment. "You really do like to be hurt."

Blake shifted restlessly, hauling at the chains. "I wouldn't know, would I?" he snarled. "You haven't done anything yet. Take a look at the table by the bed, Avon. I think you'll find everything you need."

"Do you wish to nominate a safe word beforehand?" Avon asked and Blake shook his head.

"You didn't," he said brusquely. "Why should I?"

He braced himself for the sting of a clamp or the kiss of a whip but Avon clearly valued the exacerbating effects of delay. He turned slowly, inspecting the equipment with the languid proficiency of a true connoisseur. A cursory glance at the best Albian had on offer was followed by a scornful laugh. Avon picked up something sharp and bright, examined it briefly and dropped it back in place.

"Oh, Blake," he said tenderly, almost pitying, "you forget I was taught by experts. I can do more with one hand than most people could do with this assortment of hardware."

And then, at last, he proceeded to establish the truth of that assertion, fingers roving idly across Blake's sensitised skin, stroking and gentling and, just when Blake allowed himself to relax, finding and nipping at some nerve that sent a lightning strike of pure white pain lancing down into the very core of Blake's being. Before he had completely recovered, Avon's hand assaulted him again, eliciting an even more shattering response, wringing a high, plangent cry from the bottom of Blake's lungs.

And so it continued, on and on, for an unguessable stretch of time. To begin with, Blake retained enough self-control to study Avon's methods, searching for clues that might help him understand Anna Grant. She had been, he concluded from the evidence that Avon made available, not so much a dominatrix as a torturer, pure and simple, intent on establishing the point at which a man might break. Blake had endured pain before, at the hands of his Federation torturers, and found it brutish and nasty but he had wondered, while preparing for his symbolic act, whether consent might sweeten the experience by sexualising the pain. 

It didn't. As the agony intensified, so too did his memories of the torture that had preceded the mindwipe, undermining his resistance, layering past anguish over the anguish of the present. There was no pleasure in it, none of the decadent, illicit excitement Blake had fantasised, nothing but unmitigated torment, methodically stripping away all his defences and laying him open to Avon's clinical, considering gaze. By the end of that random sequence of assaults and caresses, Blake was blind and deaf to everything else, seeing only the white flare of agony behind his eyes, hearing only the reverberation of his muffled sobs and whispered pleas.

So easy to be broken, then. He had forgotten that it was quite so easy. 

He tossed and struggled, fighting against the chains. Avon's hand lifted then, a blessed respite, hovering in midair for an instant, before swooping down towards Blake's face. Blake cringed, striving for an escape that the manacles would not permit, but Avon merely touched a finger to the corner of his eye, catching the overflow there and smearing it idly across Blake's cheek. He raised the finger to his mouth and tasted it meditatively, like a vampire who fed on tears, instead of blood.

"Too easy," he pronounced, in a coldly dismissive echo of Blake's thoughts. "I could have you begging for mercy within minutes, signing your soul away to me within the hour. But there would be less mastery in it than you believe. Anyone could do this to you, Blake. Anyone at all. You must find some other way of pandering to your masochistic fantasies. It seems I have better things to do with my time."

Shadows slid across the smooth planes of his face, as he stooped to unfasten the cuff on Blake's right wrist. He stared down for a long moment, as if saying a regretful farewell to some childhood companion, outstripped and outgrown, then turned abruptly on his heel and walked away. By the time Blake freed his left wrist and bent forward, head swimming with the aftermath of pain, to loose the manacles from his ankles, Avon was well and truly gone, beyond all possibility of following him.

Not that Blake would have followed, even if he could. He was fully occupied in struggling, sick and giddy, with the belated realisation of what he had done.

Oh yes, he had demonstrated conclusively that the power of the torturer was a smaller thing than Avon had imagined, back when Anna had seduced him into conflating love and pain. But he had proved his point at a higher cost than he intended. Standing in the place where Ast Vincitti and Anna Grant had stood, Avon had rejected the twisted yearning for punishment that had held him in thrall to them, exactly as Blake had planned. However, he had not foreseen that, in the process, Avon would inevitably judge Blake as harshly as he now judged himself.

And that, therefore, Avon's rejection of Anna and Vincitti would entail rejecting Blake as well.

 

 

A black pit of depression opened up and swallowed Blake down. It had been waiting there, right from the beginning of this mad, doomed enterprise. Occasionally - after Gan's death, for example - he had stumbled and slipped over the edge, hauling himself out again with laboured difficulty. But for the better part of the last two years he had evaded the pit, moved fast enough to stay ahead of its spreading fault-lines while he chased after a dream of freedom and justice, careless of his own enslavement to the cause, unwilling or unable to admit that the injustices he had suffered could never be truly remedied.

Then Avon had asked, "Are you happy, Blake?"

...and somehow, after that, the whole house of cards had come toppling down, in slow motion, giving him time to feel the fall of every card.

Now, surveying the ruin of his dreams, he was left with a choice that was no choice at all. He could go to Avon and explain that he had set up the scene in his cabin, designed every detail to elicit the precise response that Avon had given him, thereby exonerating himself from the charges of deluded masochism that Avon had laid against him - and, incidentally, establishing himself as an even more calculating manipulator than Ast Vincitti or Anna Grant had ever been.

Alternatively, he could say nothing and allow Avon to believe he had come to his own conclusions, alone and unaided - in which case, Avon would also continue to believe that Blake was as sick-souled and needy as he himself had been, before he finally saw Vincitti and Anna for what they were.

No choice at all. Loving Avon with this new and tender awareness that had taken possession of him on Chrysos, Blake had to give him the chance to escape from the bondage of the past. If Avon cast him off in the process, then so be it. Blake had, after all, set out to redeem his previous mistakes. 

He must, at some level, surely have remembered that redemption and martyrdom had always been closely linked.

True, he had scarcely intended to sacrifice Avon's good opinion of him, as part of his grand plan to set Avon free. But the sacrifice had been made and accepted. Blake would not rescind it now, even though he admitted, unsparingly honest, that he would to find it cruelly hard to live with the consequences. In saving Avon, he had come close, perilously close, to destroying himself.

And yet, when he considered how close he had previously come to destroying Avon, that seemed only fair.

 

At some point during the darkest night he had ever known, Blake opened Del Grant's letter. Just as Cauder had promised, it contained the information that would deliver cybersurgeon Docholli into Blake's hands. He laughed then, alone in his cabin, grimly relishing the irony of it. 

Another devil's bargain, then - lose Avon but gain Star One.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Well, he would take what profit he could, while his world collapsed around him. Next morning, haggard from the ravages of a sleepless night, Blake strode out onto the flight deck, brusquely informed his crew of this latest development and ordered Jenna to set a course for Freedom City. He was aware of Avon's gaze, fixed unwaveringly upon him, but he refused to turn and meet it, reluctant to read the judgement inscribed in those dark, sardonic eyes. Instead, he busied himself with preparations for the mission, extorting information from Orac, studying maps of the city, briefing the others exhaustively on the roles they were to play.

Then, suddenly, two hours away from planetfall, he was sickened by his own cowardice. What, precisely, was he afraid of? That Avon's eyes would contain something more unbearable than judgement - a tolerant understanding of Blake's weakness or, worse still, pity? 

Or, perhaps, that Avon, if Blake gave him a moment's space, would undermine his authority by informing the others that their leader was a closet masochist - and an incompetent one, at that, unable to withstand the pain he'd begged for?

No, not that. Even in the darkest hours of his long night's vigil, Blake had always known that his supposed secret was safe with Avon. Avon had his own private code of honour. He might harry Blake unmercifully, fight Blake tooth and nail when he believed Blake was risking their lives with reckless abandon, but he would never expose Blake's private foibles, just for the sake of making a point.

Oh no, Avon would never tell.

Convinced of that, Blake braced his shoulders and settled in the bay near Zen's screen, where anyone could approach him. For the next hour, he leafed through a batch of printouts, deliberately on display but, at the same time, somewhat removed from the activity on the flight deck, allowing for the possibility of private conversation. For an hour he waited, studiously imitating relaxation, forcing his eyes to remain fixed on the blurred lines of print whenever he heard the sound of footsteps veering towards him; controlling the shuddering tension that wracked his body when, as inevitably happened, the footsteps continued on past the bay.

Then, at the end of the hour, he finally admitted to his conscious knowledge what he had already instinctively known.

After that episode in his cabin, Avon had, apparently, determined to avoid him.

And that, as it turned out, confirmed his worst fear of all.

 

 

He took Jenna and Cally down with him to Freedom City. Avon might have been a more logical choice but Blake found he could not bring himself to compel Avon into his company, not then, not when he wanted it so much. They found Docholli, of course, and secured the next clue to the whereabouts of Star One. 

Blake had never doubted it. He would be swept along by events now, right to the bitter end. That was to be his reward for sacrificing his last chance at happiness with Avon, or his punishment, perhaps.

When they returned to the Liberator, Blake recognised at a glance that Avon and Vila were concealing some kind of misdemeanour - harmless, quite possibly, but he could detect a scent of conspiracy in the air that had not been there before he left. Under normal circumstances he would have challenged them, demanding explanations, but after his recent bout of soul-searching he felt too weary to assert his leadership or, indeed, even to speculate about the escapade. 

Let them have their petty rebellions. After all, it hardly mattered. They would continue to follow him, until they reached Star One, and that was all he needed.

Because, Blake realised without surprise, after Star One he would make the final payment on the debt that he owed Avon. He would gift the Liberator to Avon and take his departure - not returning to Earth in triumph, as he had once believed, but instead finding some distant corner of the galaxy where he could live in quiet anonymity, cultivating a garden, perhaps, or building bridges, while he gradually came to terms with what he had been and what he had done.

A strange end to all his striving but, Blake suspected, an inevitable one. He had burned brightly, in his time, but the brightest flames came to ashes in the end.

 

 

And so they travelled on towards Star One. Among all the torment and heartache of his separation from Avon, Blake found one small compensation. Servalan's revelations, which had once threatened to tear the crew apart, were nullified now by the visible and ever-widening gulf between Avon and himself. Vila seemed to have decided, to his considerable relief, that the reports of their liaison had been a collective hallucination. Cally turned an enigmatic, alien gaze on either or both of them, from time to time, but held her peace.

Only Jenna continued to acknowledge Blake's connection with Avon, by her obdurate refusal to engage with Blake on any other terms but the most casual of friendships, even when Blake might - no, would, he confessed ruefully - have welcomed some kind of minor dalliance, to distract him from his dual preoccupations: grieving over Avon, justifying his determination to destroy Star One.

And Avon? Well, Avon kept his distance but, even though he sedulously avoided any possibility of being left alone with Blake, during their interactions on the flight deck he was uncharacteristically restrained, almost helpful. On the rare occasions when Blake managed to escape the dank fog of misery that enveloped him and take a direct, unclouded look at Avon, he found himself thrilling to a curiously poignant sense of pride.

For Avon was cured, there could be no doubting that. His old carping malignancy had gone, replaced by the clear-sighted analysis and unobtrusive loyalty that Blake had always hoped for. He confronted Blake's fear of being corrupted by the power that controlling Star One would bestow on them, without compunction but, equally, without malice. He tracked and destroyed the pursuit ship escaping from Goth, announcing afterwards, "We just got Travis for you."

For you. Words that would once have confirmed Blake's dearest hopes, justifying his suspicion that Avon cared far more than he was prepared to admit, both for Blake himself and for his crusade against the Federation. But by that time, weighed down by his heavy burden of depression, he could only rouse himself by lashing out in anger, blaming Avon for abandoning them, instead of commending the action.

So he could, in all honesty, blame no one but himself when, as they drew closer to Star One, Avon reverted to his former role as Blake's own personal devil's advocate, anatomising his messianic pretensions with bitter, galling accuracy and proclaiming, in the most public of disavowals, "I want to be free of him."

He could only stare blindly at Avon, through the fog of despair that was almost smothering him now, and murmur, "I never realised. You really do hate me, don't you?"

It was the lowest point of his long journey through the dark side of his soul, the nadir of his self-hatred, endorsed by the knowledge of Avon's hatred for him. After that, Blake was hardly surprised when their assault on Star One turned out to mark, not the end of the Federation's galactic control, but the beginning of an alien invasion. In that bleak, nihilistic moment, he might, indeed, have welcomed death - and so, of course, he lived, returned to the Liberator with laser burns gouging his side.

Cally assessed his wounds, frowned and pronounced them too deep and too extensive for the regen pads to heal in anything under a standard day. She left Blake resting alone in the medical unit, making his own assessment of his condition. His wounds first, the most serious that he had sustained in all his sorties against the Federation, charred flesh galled and throbbing, while lacerated nerve endings sent frantic messages of pain and protest. The pain blurred his mind and an incipient fever distorted his perceptions, rendering him - he admitted finally, after a long internal struggle - unfit to handle the fight that loomed ahead of them.

Avon came to him then, just as he had always come when Blake needed him most, standing over his bed, looking down at him from sombre, guarded eyes.

"Will you do it, Avon?" he demanded urgently, because there was no time for equivocation now. "Will you take my place and fight off the Andromedans?"

Something stirred in the depths of Avon's gaze, then vanished, too quickly for Blake to identify it. "A rather comprehensive request," he commented. "Just out of interest, Blake, I'd like to know how you propose to justify asking me to risk all our lives."

Another of Avon's tests, at a time when Blake was comprehensively unequipped to pass it. He searched his fevered brain but his thoughts were already scattered and fragmenting, every rational argument dissolving as he attempted to put it into words. Only one notion remained - a form of logic that was hardly likely to appeal to Avon and yet, in this extremity, it was, Blake found, the sole certainty that he had left.

"On Nirvana, you promised to support me, among other things," he said, aiming for a light, jesting tone but recognising, as he spoke, that he was in deadly earnest. "I've never held you to that promise, Avon, but I want to call it in now."

Avon laughed, sharp and protesting. "Oh, Blake," he said with weary distaste. "Only you could have the gall to use that against me, when you were as pleased as I to have the records of that - marriage - erased."

As Avon's hand lifted, warding off further discussion, Blake felt the black void of depression gape wider and drag him deeper down. He had, just as he'd suspected, broken one of Avon's unwritten rules with that mention of Nirvana and by so doing, he had, presumably, destroyed his only chance of persuading Avon, against his better judgement, to stand and fight. 

Then, just as he was preparing to lie back and watch the galaxy fall, unaware and undefended, to the alien invaders, a purely personal anger fired his nerves and hitched him up onto his elbow, to lock eyes with Avon in an intractable, confrontative stare.

Damn Avon.

Damn him to hell.

There is, whatever he might choose to think, more to it than that.

"Was I pleased by your decision - your unilateral decision, I might add - to erase those records?" he asked, low and furious. "Then tell me, Avon, why I refused to revoke our contract only a few months ago, when Dersik was offering the chance of a new alliance with Chrysos, in return for my compliance."

Avon's eyes widened in a look of unconcealed surprise, rare enough for Blake, even in the grip of inchoate fury, to find it almost comical. Although, within a few brief seconds, Avon was already hooding those expressive eyes and marshalling his defences.

"Since I was not informed of this - heroic sacrifice, I am hardly in a position to explain your motives," he said haughtily. "However, if this story of yours is true, I suspect I understand why you are revealing it now. You might have trusted me more than that, Blake. My distaste for humanity does not extend to standing by and watching its wholesale slaughter by Andromedans. I would have done as you asked, without any appeals to sentiment. There was no need to take your petty manipulations quite that far."

He swung away and strode towards the door, leaving Blake with the familiar feeling that he had, at one and the same time, both won and lost. Ah well, he had won the important point, at any rate. Avon would make a stand. That was, after all, the thing that mattered most.

There was no need to feel so - mournful at receiving yet another proof of Avon's enduring contempt.

He bowed his head, determined not to prolong the anguish by watching every last second of Avon's departure, like a lovesick adolescent. But, as he sank resignedly onto the pillows, Avon hesitated and turned back. 

"One more thing," he said, terse and unwilling, as if he had to force each word separately past his lips. "I dislike being obliged to ask for information but, the way matters stand, it seems highly probable that there will be no further opportunity to clear up the... little mysteries about your recent behaviour. So, Blake, why the sudden - and, apparently, fleeting - interest in submission, after I'd recounted my history with Anna Grant?"

Blake scowled at the wall ahead of him, disinclined to probe those old wounds, not now, when there seemed no chance of future healing. "I'm surprised you have to ask," he said sullenly. "For an intelligent man like you, the timing should, surely, have explained itself."

Avon arched an eyebrow at that, examining the implications. Apparently, he had misjudged Blake when he decided, on the basis of that performance in his cabin, that Blake was as self-defeatingly masochistic as he himself had ever been. Blake had, on several occasions, implicitly accused him of an exaggerated veneration for sadists like Anna and Vincitti. It was beginning to seem as though Blake had, quite purposefully, inveigled him into taking on the torturer's role, in the hope that Avon might come to see Anna and Vincitti rather differently. He sighed. Perhaps it was just as well that Blake had decided not to elaborate on his motives at the time. Avon might have found it patronising, then. But now-

"All right, Blake," he said. "Having lived with the results of your - meddling, I am, as it happens, prepared to concede your point."

He paused for a moment, lips slightly parted, one hand lifting and turning outwards, as if contemplating further revelations. But, just as he was about to continue, a muffled shout of "Avon! We need you here" echoed down the corridor towards them, evoking Vila at his most panicstricken and helpless. Avon looked to Blake, looked away to the flight deck, looked back to Blake again with a rueful, gentled gaze.

"Rest, Roj," he said lightly. "I will do my best on your behalf. I can, at least, promise you that"; and then he was gone.

A wild, untimely joy took possession of Blake's heart, driving out the despair that had undermined him, ever since his attempt to salvage Avon's soul had turned, so drastically, against him. It seemed that, after all, their dialogue was not entirely closed. Avon had, evidently, been thinking about him, taking advantage of the long ordeal of their separation to examine everything that had passed between them, in more detail than Blake would ever have imagined.

That small, equivocal indicator heartened him enough to propel him off the bed and out into the corridor, activated by blind instinct, following Avon with the stubborn persistence of a homing bird. He struggled onward, his uninjured shoulder pressed against the wall to hold him upright, too occupied in battling the pain to consider what he wanted to say, simply knowing that, whatever the cost, he had to reach the flight deck - and Avon.

But, once there, he could only dredge up a generalised statement that he had always trusted Avon - and Avon, predictably, took that as a reflection on his own trustworthiness, not as a rebuttal of his earlier accusation, regarding Blake's innate lack of trust.

And after that, cast down so soon after he had been uplifted, Blake barely had enough strength left to drag himself back to the medical unit, activate the viewscreen on the far wall and collapse, half-fainting, onto the bed.

 

 

By the time he recovered sufficiently to focus on the screen, the Liberator had already fired on the Andromedans and battle had been joined. Avon strode about the flight deck, magnificently in command, directing and ordering and encouraging the crew, one minute berating them for some dangerous error, next minute inspiring them to even greater heights of bravery and endurance. Cally slaved for him; Vila refrained from his usual grumbles, working steadily and indefatigably; Jenna responded with efficient promptness to each new shift in strategy. 

Watching from his godlike distance, Blake could find no fault with Avon's performance. He had, it seemed, finally stepped out from Blake's shadow, into a brighter light. No question about it, Avon would, if they survived, deserve to take control of the Liberator. 

He's free, at last, Blake thought and then amended wryly: free of me.

For a moment, dark depression threatened again, but only for a moment. There was no room for self-pity here. All his petty human weaknesses had been cleansed by the rigours of the present crisis, refined into an unsullied admiration for Avon's calm competence, Avon's dispassionate assessment of every Andromedan onslaught and attack. If Blake had one regret, it was that he could not be there to share the burden and help Avon implement his well-planned tactics. That was how it should have been - the two of them working harmoniously together, instead of perpetually dragging each other down, tearing each other apart. 

And not just on the flight deck, either. They could have - they should have - done so much more for each other in the privacy of their cabins, as well.

This was, of course, (with a rueful glance at the chaos on the viewscreen) hardly the time to be thinking about such purely personal matters. 

But if only... 

Ah, if only... 

Removed from the action, freed from all responsibility, Blake allowed himself to drift into a harmless, if improbable, fantasy in which Avon brought the Liberator through the battle unscathed and, elated by his victory, endowed with the sense of a new lease on life, hurried straight to his cabin, where Blake - his wounds miraculously healed in half the usual time - was eagerly awaiting him. 

It would be different this time, Blake decided, dreaming on the brink of disaster. None of the impetuous, selfish haste that had marred most of his previous dealings with Avon. No, if he had one last chance, he would take his time, give Avon everything he wanted, a leisured exploration of that loved, familiar body - kissing the small, responsive nipples that stiffened so eagerly under Blake's tongue; kissing Avon's mouth; kissing Avon's cock; kissing the arch of Avon's instep and the secret, tender flesh that lined the crook of his elbow. And he would allow Avon time as well, time to experience the simple pleasures of mapping another body with eyes and hands and mouth. Time to look and touch and talk and laugh together, to share their mutual delight.

His groin throbbed, a sweetly sensual ache, overriding the pain of his wounds. So glorious and transcendent that Blake no more felt inclined to masturbate, there on the bed in the medical unit, than to ravish his imaginary Avon with urgent greed, bringing the fantasy to a swift and sweaty conclusion. Instead, he drifted in an erotic trance, planning ways to show Avon just how much more the future might hold in store for them. Soothed and tranquil, safe in the harbour of Blake's arms, Avon could at last, Blake fervently believed, confront the fears that had turned love into a penance and a torment and, in the very act of confrontation, win a second victory, making love as an affirmation and a comfort, not the poignant, desperate struggle it had always been for him, up until now.

That vision seemed so real and perfect and beautiful that it hurt to surface from the dream and remember that, no matter whether the battle with the Andromedans went well or badly, Avon would still be lost to him. So Blake refused that knowledge and, wilfully nostalgic, immersed himself in the dream again, studying Avon's ivory skin and darkly shining eyes, lambent on the viewscreen, then translating those evanescent glimpses into images of Avon naked and languorous on his bed, all power and passion, arms lifted in a confident surrender, as he waited to be transported into a place that only the two of them, together, could ever reach.

Then, as he looked up to refresh his memories of Avon's aristocratic profile, the viewscreen flickered and its images dwindled down into a fading pinpoint that flared up once, brightly, then vanished completely. The lights were dimming too, a sure sign that Zen was closing down the least necessary systems, to preserve the remaining energy banks for as long as could be managed. Blake heaved himself upright, desperate to assist in the coming crisis or, at the very least, to be there with his companions in their final hour. 

But the incautious movement jarred his side and sent shocks of pain thrilling along his nerves, darkening his vision, thrusting him back onto the pillows in an irrevocable swoon. 

 

He was roused from his deathlike trance by a frantic, familiar voice, calling imperatively, "Blake! Wake up! Zen says the Liberator has been damaged, beyond the auto-repair units' capacity to fix it. We have to get you to the life capsules. Now, Blake!"

Blake opened his eyes and smiled with drowsy pleasure. Jenna was bending over him, a smudge of ash on her forehead and a scorch mark, still smouldering slightly, branded across the ruby leather of her jacket. Steadfast Jenna, who would never abandon him, no matter how dark the hour nor how badly he had treated her. Loyal, uncomplaining Jenna, who deserved far better than this.

"Thanks for alerting me," he said, lifting his hand, with some difficulty, to lightly touch her face. "I'll be all right now. Get out of here, while you can. Don't let me slow you down."

Hazel eyes narrowed in furious denial. Jenna shook her head and hauled at his shoulder, attempting ineffectually to manhandle him off the bed, while she rapped out a volley of smugglers' curses at his pigheaded obstinacy. Blake was renewing his plea for her to leave, when an airy, cynical laugh cut off his persuasions in midflight. He looked up to see Avon lounging in the doorway, as elegantly unperturbed as if he were merely embarking on a routine mission; as if the little world that they had inhabited for so long were not collapsing in ruins all around them.

"Yes, I thought you might see this as an opportunity for some misguided heroics," he said pleasantly. "Go on ahead, Jenna. I am better equipped to deal with Blake's tantrums than you - and I give you my word that I will bring him out alive and, no doubt, kicking."

Jenna hesitated fractionally and straightened her shoulders, as if shaking off some heavy burden, borne for so long that she had almost forgotten it was there.

"I believe you, Avon," she said, grimly amused. "Good luck to you both. I have a feeling you'll need it."

She stooped to kiss Blake's cheek, a gesture of farewell, then turned resolutely and strode away, pausing, when she reached the doorway, to frown and come to a decision and hold her hand out to Avon. He took it and lifted it, inscribed a courtly kiss upon Jenna's palm. They gazed into each other's eyes for an extended instant, the most intimate of antagonists, before Jenna shrugged and recaptured her hand and left, with a last "Goodbye."

"A charming performance," Blake grated, as soon as she was gone. "But really quite unnecessary. I don't need your help, Avon, any more than I needed Jenna's - and I certainly don't want your pity."

"That's lucky," Avon murmured. "You don't have it, Blake. What on earth makes you think I'd start pitying you, at this late stage in the game? A most unlikely move on my part, I would have thought."

"As unlikely as your presence here," Blake retorted. "I was under the impression that you wanted to be free of me."

Avon stood very still and eyed him very thoughtfully, straightbacked and steady amid the writhing tendrils of smoke, insinuating through the open door. "It's true that I couldn't find my way clear to play the sadist to your masochist," he said finally. "However, since that turned out to be another of our many misapprehensions, I see no reason why we shouldn't leave together."

Blake's forehead puckered as he pondered this invitation, striving, against the fever that still hazed his brain, to interpret it correctly. On consideration, he decided that a double negative represented a relatively high level of commitment from Avon, so he sat up and eased himself off the bed, accepting Avon's proffered shoulder, taking refuge for a moment there, while he faltered and fought for balance. 

As they lurched towards the door, he inquired, deliberately casual, "So you don't - entirely - hate me, Avon?"

"I can't recall ever saying I did," Avon told him. "But then, you have always been quick to place the worst interpretation on events, where I am concerned."

Blake shrugged, then winced at the pull on his scorched flesh. "I'd call it a perfectly reasonable interpretation," he said shortly. "I could have saved us both a lot of grief, if I'd admitted on Nirvana that you were everything I wanted, instead of claiming I'd rather have spent my shore leave with a whore."

"Grandstanding again, Blake?" Avon observed dryly, as they emerged into the smoke-filled corridor. "The fault was not altogether yours. By the same argument, I could have prevented our later - difficulties - by explaining what I meant, when I said then that: 'It wasn't worth it'."

Blake had, by now, a fair idea of Avon's glossary on that statement and he found himself reluctant, in these direst of straits, to hear Avon recite his inevitable credo on the pains, frustrations and general futility of love. Besides, he had another item or two to add to his own confession.

"We might," he stated, "still have come to an understanding, if I hadn't rejected you so publicly on Chrysos."

"Oh, I brought that on myself, really," Avon said absently, steering Blake past a burst of flame from a sub-control room. "I did rather inveigle you into that diplomatic marriage, to see whether you would remember that you were already married."

"A test I failed with flying colours," Blake said, morbidly self-lacerating. "Just as I signally failed to comfort you, after your ordeal with Vincitti."

Expecting Avon to stiffen and withdraw, he positively jumped at the sound of a low, wicked chuckle. "Who knows, you might have been more sympathetic, if I hadn't been kissing Servalan, when you arrived on your rescue mission," Avon countered, perversely entertained.

Startled by this unanticipated perspective, Blake lost his footing and stumbled, bracing himself against the corridor wall. Ridiculous, he thought, suppressing a reciprocal chuckle. What an absurd pair we are. Even when we attempt apologies, we somehow contrive to make it a competition. 

"I turned to Jenna, at the point where you needed me most," he said, desperate to indict himself, and then, when Avon remained unresponsive, "I knocked you out on Saracen and forcibly returned you to the Liberator, without your consent." 

Avon's arm tensed around him, then. "Oh, Blake," he sighed. "Don't expect me to blame you for that. You merely saved me the trouble of inventing an excuse to change my mind."

By that time they had reached the flight deck: a tumult of falling rubble and exploding circuitry, veiled with smoke and lit with yellow flame. While the world burned around them, Avon tilted his head and smiled up at Blake, as serenely self-possessed as any demon moving, untouched, through the torments of a raging inferno.

"And now we come to your recent visit to Chrysos where, apparently, you turned down a second chance to win the Elders to your cause by way of marriage," he said, guiding Blake round a furiously sparking console. "Forgive my curiosity, if it strikes you as impertinent, but - why did you fail to mention this to me at the time?"

Blake's foot skidded on a rivulet of melted plass, dripping continuously from the ruined console. He clutched Avon's shoulder more tightly and growled, "Why bother? I hardly imagined you'd be impressed by a display of sentiment on my part."

"Sentiment?" Avon mused. "I might have chosen a shorter word."

As they passed, the console caught fire and blazed up like a beacon, lighting their way to the exit. "Love?" Blake asked, while they manoeuvred through the fiery maze. "Not a word I thought you ever used."

"I have not used it now," Avon pointed out, eyes as perilously bright as the flames around them.

"But you might, in future?" Blake guessed.

It was a perfectly timed example of his inconvenient knack for finding and revealing what Avon assumed he had successfully hidden. Avon laughed, simultaneously elated by the danger all around them and by the seductive sense of being, as he now felt, fully known. 

"If I live long enough," he answered, fending off Blake's insight. "Which, may I remind you, is still in question."

A beam trailing smoke and fire crashed down onto the deck, not far from where they stood, in a dramatic illustration of his point. Avon locked his arm more securely about Blake's waist, drawing him onward, and for the next few minutes they concentrated on navigating the obstacles ahead of them. But the instant they reached the relative safety of the life-capsule bay, Blake's hand shot out to clamp round Avon's arm and compel him into stillness.

"I told you I loved you, the night you escaped Vincitti's clutches, although I can't say I really encouraged you to believe me then," he said, solemn and intense. "I meant it, nonetheless. I always will."

Avon twisted in his grasp, evading Blake's steady stare, to glance at the lights flashing on the control panel behind them. "There are three life-capsules remaining," he announced. "A double capsule and two singles. We could still leave the Liberator separately but... we might, I think, do better together."

Blake's imminent scowl wavered and stalled, transforming into a radiant smile, as he registered the import of that statement. Blake had always, Avon remembered, even in the most unlikely circumstances, felt an overwhelming need to unpack his heart with words. For Avon, conversely, action served the purpose better - although, as he pressed the key that rendered the double capsule operational, some obscure impulse compelled him to give Blake what he wanted: for the sheer novelty of it, perhaps.

"I made a promise on Nirvana without thinking much about it, just as, I suspect, you did yourself," he said over his shoulder. "But I am, after all, a man of my word. In the end, that's all there is."

When he turned, Blake was slumped against the wall, clutching his bandaged side and staring incredulously, silenced for the first time in Avon's memory. He permitted himself a small, triumphant smile, then activated the sliding door of the capsule and helped Blake over its rim, settling him solicitously in the further of the two seats. At the last minute, just before he boarded, he looked back down the corridor at the flames marauding outward from the flight deck.

"It seems we have come full circle," he said with whimsical amusement. "On Nirvana, I compared you to King Arthur. Do you remember how that story ended, Blake?" 

Blake shook his head, still mute, so Avon continued: "With the king's last and most faithful knight placing his wounded body in the barge that will carry him away to the Otherworld." 

Blake gazed in wonder, moved beyond words by the role that Avon had, albeit with his usual flippancy, assigned to himself. But, while he struggled to reply, the teasing mockery faded from Avon's eyes.

"Oh, and with King Arthur's valiant promise that he will return from the dead, if ever the world has need of him," he added, bleak and accusing.

The flames flared higher, gilding the outline of an implacable profile, equipping Avon with the fiery wings of an avenging angel. Blake, staring up at him, helplessly dazzled, swallowed hard and cleared his throat. 

"But perhaps the chronicles were wrong," he rasped. "Perhaps Arthur and his knight went away together, to some anonymous bolthole where they lived, quiet and contented, letting the world take care of its own affairs."

"Perhaps," Avon said with an ambiguous smile. "Well, Blake, let's find out which of us proves to be correct."

He swung himself into the capsule, closed the door and keyed in a set of coordinates. As the capsule began to disengage, he leaned over and kissed Blake, hard and possessively, on the mouth. Blake gasped softly and responded, feeling Avon's heartbeat strong and steady against his chest, knowing that, no matter what might befall them in the future, this would suffice for now.

 

 

The galaxy was burning like a funeral pyre, piled high with the wreckage of Andromedan spacecraft, combusting pursuit ships, the scattered remnants of the Federation fleet. The Liberator wallowed through the gulfs between the stars, crippled and helpless, its former mastery of space reduced to a struggle for survival. As the ship plunged into a smoking spiral, a small shining pod broke away, plummeting down, speedy and unstoppable, towards the planets that orbited in regular ellipses, far below.

It fell in a direct untrammelled line, bright against the darkness, blazing with all the hope and promise that a watcher, following its passage, might wish upon a falling star.


End file.
